Day 15: Interactive notebooks

AP CSA
Students worked on Practice It in class.  I had about 8 students finish it at home for "fun".  This is such weird class to me :)

I told them they could use that time to relax or start working ahead on some String problems.  Most of them choose to work on String problems.  Goofballs.

I also had plenty of students who had trouble just reading the assignment.  I did model this but it didn't really stick.  I could (and should) give them a framework to help with the reading.  Maybe a flow chart like this:

1. What is it asking you to write (a method, a class, a statement)?
2. If it requires writing a method
1. Are there any parameters for this method?
1. How many?
2. What type is the parameter(s)?
2. Does the method return any thing?
1. What type of thing does it return?
3. If it requires writing a class...
1. What fields are there
2. What constructors are required
3. What methods are required

Any way, I circulated and helped students troubleshoot which really consisted of me finding missing curly brackets and misspellings along with helping them read the directions. 

Another issue that came up was the role of a "return" - many times their programs got rejected because they had a series of if statements with returns inside and no return overall for the method.

AP CSP

We added things to our notebooks today.  I wonder how students feel about notebook days.  To me they could feel really comfortable because they just need to follow directions and make connections to in class activities, OR they might feel really boring.  

Any way, next week we are going to do our "how the internet works" project.  From there I have to decide if I want to do some programming or go straight into unit 2.  I have a visitor coming to class on the 16th so I need to figure out what we are going to do then. 

Geometry

Gave an algebra gateway today - about 7 students got 9/10 which is considered a "passing" score - we are looking for mastery since it is basic algebra problems (solve for x-type of things).   I also have TONS of students not doing homework.  Too many really.  I am going to move to checking homework daily which will also help me build connections with students, I believe.

One Good Thing

One of my former CSP students (now CSA students) had AppLab open.  I asked him what he was doing and he said, "we are trying to get this to work..." they had created a project with a database last year but never quite got it to work.  Now they wanted to give it another chance.