Learning From My Students

Some days I think my greatest edge over my students is that I am better at debugging than they are. Well there is that I actually read documentation as well but putting that aside for now.

This semester I am teaching with AppInventor. It’s a pretty cool development tool and I have been playing with it off and on for some time. I’m far from expert at it though. Usually I am happy to keep a couple of lessons ahead of the students. There is only so much I can learn on my own though. So I learn a lot from my students. While anyone can learn from their own mistakes the really smart people learn from the mistakes of others. So I learn a lot because I see a lot of mistakes.

Students make all sorts of mistakes. I’m not sure mistakes is the right work though. Perhaps I should say they try all sorts of things that don’t work as they expect them to work. At some point it becomes my job to help them figure out what is going on. Since they are so clever about try9ing things that would not occur to me this is a wonderful learning experience. Fortunately I have seed a lot of things go wrong using a lot of programming languages and tools over the years so I can usually figure things out pretty quickly.

The advantage of this style of learning is that it helps me anticipate things – misunderstandings, incorrect assumptions, and what not – that I can build into my teaching going further. While I can’t cover every possible error even if I knew them all I can at least point students in better directions.

At the same time I have been having students learn things beyond what I am teaching on their own. I have a couple of students who just love to try things in Appinventor on their own. Sometimes in class but often at home. These students are more than happy to share what they learn. They share with me and they share with their peers. Encouraging this sort of experimentation is, I believe, key to being a good teacher as well as being a life long learner.

Teaching this course has probably taught me more about Appinventor than I could ever have learned on my own. I call that a win.