Garth Flint had another good post today (Last Day of School And Done with Java) He lists some interesting projects he assigned and writes about some lessons learned. Any time a teacher learns from student projects I count that as a double win. But one of his comments really resonated with me. Garth writes “I did only two of the six assignments myself. With the others I saw the solution so did not code them up. I should have coded them up just so I could answer questions better for the students. “ Highlight mine.
Some years ago I wrote a couple of editions of project books for both C# and Visual Basic. (I may update them this summer if I have time.) People seemed to like them and I received numerous requests for coded solutions. I had them and usually provided them. I really think that teachers should always write their own solutions though. In fact, the less you know about programming the more you should code up your own solutions. As Garth pointed out in his post, when you code your own solutions you can better help students.
And if a project is a good learning experience for students it will also be a good learning experience for a teacher who is working on their own skill and knowledge base.
I’ve got a ton of programming experience and know a lot of tricks techniques that I would never expect beginners to know. So I try to write solutions using the tools and language constructs my students will have at their disposal. This helps me understand what issues students are likely to come across. It saves me time later.
Of course students are clever and think of ways to do things that an experienced coder would never come up with so I learn some new things from them. And the smart kids look up features we don’t cover in class and build “interesting” solutions. That’s all good. Better than good really. I’ve actually come up with several new to me ideas from students.
To be clear, I don’t want every student to write their solution the same way I write mine. I want to see some creativity and imagination. But I also don’t want to have to admit I have no idea how to implement a solution of my own. Well, not often anyway.
Since I teach several level of CS from our freshmen course which only has a few weeks of programming to our APCP P course with Programming Honors in the middle I sometimes code up several solutions. Some things that are possible with limited tools are much easier with more advanced tools. Arrays for example can be a powerful tool. I wrote about this a couple of years ago at Taking Things To Another Level where I talked about revisiting a popular freshmen project later in Programming Honors.
It’s summer break and I’ll be doing some coding. Trying new projects to see what students will need to know to code them themselves. I’ve been looking forward to having the time to do this for moneys.
"students are clever and think of ways to do things that an experienced coder would never come up with" was part of my rational (besides being lazy) I did not code up solutions. I knew their solutions would not look like mine. I should have coded them up. Sometimes I get a bit too busy to do my teaching job properly. And "busy" and "lazy" are both 4-letter words. I have been teaching programming for 30 years and for some reason this is a lesson I cannot get in my head. Have a code solution for everything even if you do see the solution in your head.
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