Are You Assigning Projects or Recipes?

Chris Lehmann, the amazing principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia,  says “If you assign a project and get back 30 of the same thing, that’s not a project, that is a recipe.”  Now recipes have their place for sure.  They often make a good start. I see programming as a creative thing (art/craft/skill/science/what ever) and I want to see creativity from my students.

For me this starts with day one. In my introduction to my classes I tell students that I want to see creativity. I want them to make projects their own. This can be a difficult thing for some students. There are teachers out there who do want to see the same thing from every student. It makes things easy to grade I guess. Or something.

Very often in early projects is is hard to be creative. There are only so many ways to calculate degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius. On the other hand you can ask students to find two measurements they like and convert one of them to the other. You’ll be amazed at the combinations students come up with. Sure you’ll get the simple conversion using degrees Kelvin but someone will do miles to furlongs.

Even simple programs can get creative with tools that make graphics easy. C# and Visual Basic both have the Windows Forms libraries to use but Processing can make using Java or Python colorful and graphic as well. To say nothing of a lot of block programming systems.

Of course, students getting bogged down in how a program looks can be an issue at times but that can be dealt with though conversation.

An even better way is often letting students choose their own projects. I always finish up a semester with a larger project that students select themselves. Student get very creative with those projects. The Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles course requires a Create project which serves a similar purpose.

For smaller projects it can take a bit more to encourage creativity. After all if there is known input and expected output that’s going to be the same. Here is where you want students to be creative in their code. Let students decide if they want to use a for loop, a while loop, or even a foreach loop. Decision structures can also be done in different ways. Having students turn in code that looks different is a great learning/teaching opportunity. I love showing students the different solutions that students turn in. This both encourages them to try to be different and lets them see different solutions. The idea is to open their minds to looking at problems in different ways.

The most important thing is to encourage creativity. Celebrate it!