CS Methods Sept 16 2010

Class

Course Outline and assignments

How many of your students will go on to take CS in university or college?

• - what are the implications of that for teaching your class?
• - what do you want them to learn?
• - does that effect what language you will use?
• - does that mean you should lower your standards/expectations?

Rules about cheating - what is ‘cheating’ in CS? We all borrow code or code ideas. What are the limits?

School visits - choose 3 Mondays

Using Scratch to teach CS - John Maloney
    - is this just 'watering down' the CS course or is it the way to interest students in CS?
    - why would you NOT use this?

CS curriculum - from Man Ed
    - new ideas about GLOs 1 - 3
   - GLO 4 - technology
       - what's typical, what's unusual
      - does the sequence make sense? What alternate sequence could you use?
      - is it just another math course?

So - how should we get them started with CS?
What are different ways of getting them used to code?

• Give code with blanks to fill in
• Give code with simple errors
• Use templates that they can adapt

Remember
This is not just another math course!

x we need other examples and graphics and movement and ..........

x CS language skills / social skills / problem solving skills

x different aspects of CS - what should they know?

Jane McGonigal on TED and why we need to game more!
George Dyson on TED on The development of computers

Lab

Shared Google calendar - add your due dates.
Netvibes, google reader or another RRS reader.
Class wiki - request access
Gliffy - try it out




For next class - look at
- ten Golden Rules for Teaching Computer Science   
www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/talks/cse-97/cse-97.pdf
       (great ideas, but what are the problems?)

Linked on my netvibes.com/rredekopp page are:

Publish Post

- the CS Teacher blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/default.aspx
- and check the CSTA blog - http://blog.acm.org/csta/