What does a good CS class look like?

This question came up in a meeting I had with someone from the Upperline School in NY.  Really it is what I have continued to struggle with since transitioning to teach more CS than math.

When I think about teaching math, I know what a good math lesson looks like.  It has all students collaboratively solving problems.  But when it comes to CS, I haven't necessarily seen a lot of "WOW! that was a good CS lesson" in other classes - in fact, I've only observed one other person's CS class, and it seemed like an average class.  Nothing I was dying to replicate in my own class.

In my class, so much of the programming tasks are pretty individual - people working by them selves to learn a new aspect of programming.  They talk to one another when they run into problems, but I don't see students wrestling with content the same way I see students in math wrestle with content.

Our class-code-alongs provide a bit of a glimpse into that, but still there is this awkward timing thing that I don't have quite down.

Where I did see collaborative problem solving in my CS class recently was when we did the brainstorming for our Simon game.   I think that can be expanded on to give students a task and see what they come up with.

Next, I want to give students a challenge to make another game - maybe 2048 the game, or a memory game?  I think this could be a fun, collaborative, and rigorous challenge for students.  I could even create my own code to give students who need a bit more scaffolding after they struggle a bit.

I keep coming back to the question of "who is learning in my class, when, and how do I know?"  Here's  how I have identified my "learners" in my class thus far:

• I have a few students who are constantly asking questions - it shows that they are thinking about processing what they are taking in and making sense of it.  
• My students who "go rogue" and decide to do their own projects are other students I would identify as my "learners" also - they are creatively arriving at solutions.
• My students who can look at someone elses' code and troubleshoot it.
• My students who create things they are proud of... you can see it on their face - they are happy and satisfied with their work.
• Students who see the need to define the problem - again, they are asking questions and keeping the big picture and the small picture in mind.
• My students who re-read their code before asking me - have looked at the errors and tried to make sense of them.  I have noticed a gap between students who know how to read code and those who don't.  This was especially true when we took a break from programming and then came back to it.  Some students were writing some funky things like if (x = 6 or 7) - logically I know what they were trying to do, but they were pretty far off the mark from a syntax perspective.  I suppose this is much like PEMDAS in math - they might be capable of thinking about a problem from a big picture, but when it comes to computation, it can be rough.  

When looking at this list, I am noticing that a lot of these things are happening when we do projects - not just the little stages in CodeStudio.  It is so hard to see the learning when they are "plugged" in to the computer...  obviously there is a time and a space for this type of learning, but I am wondering if I need to move to peer programming models or replace it with some more open ended-esque projects.

I really wish there was someone out there doing CS education research much like Jo Boaler is doing maths education research.

DDR re-make - brainstorming and a gallery walk

I started this lesson by having students brainstorm how they would build the app.  In groups they had to answer the questions:

1. What would the UI include?
2. What variables do you think you will need?
3. What functions will you need?

In my first hour, I had them do this as a table on mini-whiteboards, but inevitably one person did the majority of the writing and the other students couldn't really see what was being written since the board was the opposite direction of them.  SO, I moved to a "Harkness" style method and had students in my next class do their work on the whiteboards around the room which got more students involved in the brainstorming process.  Then we did a gallery walk so they could look at other students's work.  

Here is some of the work:

I actually loved this structure.  All students were up and engaged, they were making sense of eachothers' ideas, and problem solving.   I had created a UI for all students to start with along with comments for what the code should include.  I found this structure useful during the ColorSleuth app so we all had the same ID names while we were programming.  I had also seen this commented out skeleton in some of the MOOCs I have been exploring and found it to be a good way to almost literally put in scaffolding in place.  I didn't show this to students ahead of time, but I almost wish I would have given them a screen shot of the UI so they could focus a bit more on logic during this time.  Here is what the starter document looked like.

Taking time to do the gallery walk was important for the class, too.  Doing this I learned, from a teacher perspective, that the problem needed to be well defined if we were going to do this as a class.  Things like, how scoring would work, does the pattern get longer over time, etc. are all questions for which we needed to agree on answers.    I think the brainstorming may have been even more useful had we developed these answers before going to the whiteboards.  BUT, I also think we could have introduced the big problem of "make a Simon game", had students develop these answers and questions themselves, worked for a few days, and then done a reveal of the different approaches to the problem.  For the stuff we were doing together though, we wanted to have the same vision.

A lot of students also brainstormed things that I had decided we wouldn't focus on together (like score, for example).  It was helpful to write these down as "possible extensions" inside the code so students could work on that extension at the end of our time together.  By the end of two days, this is what our program looked like.

Our possible extension list got quite long too, including:

// - Make it auto-check the solution after you are done hitting the keys

// - Make the "Play Again" button work

// - Make a cooler "you win/lose" screen

// - Make the pattern longer as the game goes on

// - Keep a score

// - Add other possible key presses

// - Add sounds

// - Make the pattern go faster as the game goes on

// - Make it wait for the series to play BEFORE someone can enter arrows

// - Protect against trolls so that they cannot "check your work" BEFORE pressing the "start" button (since both arrays are empty, it will say the won)

I also learned that by brainstorming with other people, students developed some creative and elegant solutions, solutions that I hadn't considered when developing the code myself.  This makes me even more excited to try the "big problem" approach later on in the course.

Next, I want to use this problem we did together as a lens for the writing involved with the Create task for CSP.  We should be able to answer a lot of the questions about abstraction and development with what we have done here.

CS Teacher First: I made my own lesson!

I suppose this is not the first lesson I have made for my CS classes but it was by-far the most extensive one I had made myself.  Here is how it went:

In a previous code.org lesson, I had the class incrementally develop a ColorSleuth App.  I really liked the format of the lesson.  It was a bit of brainstorming, it was a bit of independent work, a bit of full-class work, and then students could decide how to enhance the app even further.  I liked the discussions that took place and the problem solving.  Students liked making a game (they all love games)!

I was looking for a similar project but couldn't really adapt anything from the code.org progression of CSP to fit my needs.  I wanted students to get comfortable with using arrays, having keyboard data, and also testing out their code.  Maybe I am the only person who programs with an obnoxious amount of "console.log" statements, but to me, console.log's are to computer science as checking your answer is to math.  YET many of my students would code up a huge section of code, run it, and then get mad when it didn't work.  I wanted students to be able to identify how/when to test things.

While brainstorming for this project, I knew I wanted to figure out a way to make the end project a game.  Initially I thought about doing a "memory" game which would have the added benefit of allowing students to find images that they liked themselves.  The UI seemed a little clunky for something like that, and I wasn't exactly sure how I would use arrays, but I would like to re-visit this idea a little later - or maybe challenge a student to figure it out.

After searching around, I decided to try and make a "Simon" type game.  I thought of using colors, but wanted to incorporate the keyboard element so I changed it to arrows.  I wanted a game where arrows would flash on the screen and you had to repeat that sequence with the keyboard.  When I showed this idea to students, they thought of it more as DDR, which totally worked too.

I was able to get the UI set up, and the arrays in place and understood how I could code up the logic.  It seemed so close to being "there" but animating was a bit more than I was ready for.  Thankfully I was also able to get some support from GT at code.org to help me understand the "setTimeout" command and then applied it into the code.

THEN I took it to the students...