Newest Questions
1,257 questions
18
votes
10
answers
3k
views
Recommended IDE for teaching web development to beginners
I have been assisting an IT teacher who has recently started teaching computer science to year 7-9s (11-13 year-olds). This year they will just be covering basic client-side web development: HTML, CSS ...
- 283
6
votes
10
answers
477
views
When teaching Web Development, should server or client side come first?
I teach full stack web development because the purpose of the course is to give an overview of how a complete website is created, from SQL for database management to HTML/CSS/JS for front-end to ruby ...
- 4,815
16
votes
8
answers
738
views
How can I convey the idea of a programming language vs. a markup language?
When I try and teach web development to absolute beginners, I seem to always get a question about the roles of HTML/CSS/JS and about how the browser renders the HTML. It seems to me that the confusion ...
- 4,815
21
votes
12
answers
2k
views
Should assembly language be taught in an introductory course (or soon after)?
Should ye ole' fashioned assembly language be taught to help students develop a sense of how actual underlying computational hardware supports/allows running their higher-level or more abstract ...
- 1,903
6
votes
6
answers
627
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Using Processing as an entry point in an Introductory Course
We have two entry points for programming students here: one is web-oriented and features HTML5/CSS3/ECMA6, and the other is in a robotics environment using LabView. Both classes address the "big 5": ...
- 2,359
43
votes
31
answers
8k
views
Analogy for teaching recursion
When teaching recursion, what is the best analogy people use to teach the idea of recursion. There are some nice artistic representations
And the idea of repeatedly cutting a phone book or dictionary ...
- 755
21
votes
11
answers
5k
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Cheating on labs
It is spectacularly easy to cheat on CS labs at the high school level and above (roughly ages 14 and up), particularly on short, early assignments. In fact, there is article in today's NY Times about ...
- 34.8k
22
votes
9
answers
1k
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Should the first Programming/Algorithms class be taught in pseudo-code?
When I was studying, my professors had different approaches when teaching programming to beginners:
Choose a language with which the professor is comfortable and fulfills the course requirements but ...
- 403
8
votes
3
answers
415
views
Teaching Induction to Prove the Correctness of Algorithms
This is a subject that I have had a lot of trouble clarifying for students. I can explain the components well enough, but I have trouble getting kids to connect the big picture of the proof to the ...
- 34.8k
9
votes
11
answers
713
views
Objects Lab Before Inheritance and Polymorphism
I am finding it very difficult to create a lab for Objects in Java before we've involved Inheritance and Polymorphism. The problem, as I see it, is that Inheritance and Polymorphism are basically the ...
- 34.8k
10
votes
4
answers
604
views
Is it possible to ensure division of labor on a group assignment?
Let's say I've assigned my Intro to CS class their first group programming assignment. A common problem is that the most invested student in the group will end up doing the majority of the work. At ...
- 209
26
votes
8
answers
5k
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What autograding software do folks use for Java code?
Grading currently either takes me a huge amount of time, or gets done in an extremely cursory way. It occurs to me that, if my students were able to submit code into some sort of autotester, they ...
- 34.8k