I find that planning for much farther out than a week is not a good use of time. Not that I don’t have a general idea of what we’ll be doing. I mean planning in detail. More often than not, I throw out my “well planned” lesson the day or two before we’re going to do it because I think of something better. This results in some on the fly teaching, which, as Mike Zamansky pointed out in this blog post has some value for students. I generally agree with Mike’s assessment of the situation, and I’ll add this: planning is not the same as scripting. Generally I have a topic in mind for the day and I go about teaching it as I see fit (at that moment). Sometimes the examples I use will differ from class to class. This more often than not occurs because the students have different interests and, once I get to know them, I try to cater my examples to them. That only applies to direct (group) teaching though, not necessarily to assignments.

As soon as possible, I like to get students making stuff. Whether it be a program to help them with their Algebra class, a study tool for history or science vocabulary, a hangman game, a choose your own adventure game, etc. I find they are much more engaged when they’re making something they value. Since there tend to be multiple ways of creating working solutions for a project, working out a single solution ahead of time is often not as helpful. I do, at first, give them small chunks of starter code. Sometimes this code comes from me working out a program, then deleting the main chunks. Other times, it’s just to get their brains going and I haven’t necessarily figured out all of the inner workings yet.

I agree that working out problems before assigning them allows the teacher to know ahead of time what difficulties students may have and how to address those difficulties. Another advantage to working problems ahead of time is it gives me a chance to make sure the problems aren’t too hard, or go too far off-track from the objective. It also gives me a little bit of time to figure out how to extend the problems for my more advanced students who enjoy the extra challenge.

The downside to this of course is students think that I know everything and this stuff should be easy. I also have a really hard time resisting the temptation to help them by just telling them what to do (especially later in the day).

Also, by having prepared solutions, they don’t see me pounding my head on the table trying to figure out what is wrong with my code. They don’t see my missing colon, missed indentation, misspelled variable names, missing return statements, etc. They see a finished product that took problem solving and hard work, but they don’t actually see me working hard. I don’t think they believe me either when I tell them how much effort I put into my solutions. 🙂

While knowing potential pitfalls students are going to run into, I find that proactively pointing these out is generally a waste of time. The students have to encounter the problem before they are listening for a solution. I don’t know how many times I have warned the class up front about a particularly tricky problem (and how they might go about handling it) to just have them ask me 5 minutes later anyway, “What did you say?” In fact, when they run into a problem, I really want them using their resources (Python/Java documentation, Google, Stack Exchange, a classmate, etc.) before they ask me anyway.

I started this blog post with a very different idea of topic in mind. I am currently working on rewriting my CS 1 curriculum (if you could call it that, more like a collection of small projects and problem sets with some Google Slides and Youtube videos). I’ve been inspired by the 100 Days of Web in Python tutorials that I’ve been working through (just wrapped up day 21). I would love to create something similar for my classroom. Where each day is carefully planned out and chunked in a logical way. In my experience, most students have a different work ethic than professional programmers, hobbyists, etc. that would be taking this course along with me. As a result, my course would need to be structured differently and would need to include things besides just programming in Python.

That being said, I have a ton of ideas, but given my difficulty planning more than a week out, it’s hard for me to really flush them out. I now have two full years of teaching Python under my belt, and while I think I’m getting the hang of things for the most part, I’m still struggling with a few things:

• Sequencing: what should I start with? how far should we go? Last year, I started with Turtle graphics and the kids did really well. This year, I’m considering going back to ASCII art and printing/inputting text before introducing the Turtle. By the end of the 2nd semester, students have used OOP to build a basic “Tron” style 2 player game using the Turtle module.
• Homework submission: While not really directly related to the curriculum, I need to have some idea of how students will be turning in the assignments. I still don’t have a good system in place for students to submit their assignments. I have used Google classroom the past two years. The downside is, I have to have all of the assignments created in Google Classroom. Once I create them, they’re difficult to change if I need to (you have to edit each class individually after creation). I like the ability to give feedback within the system (not that the students read my feedback, but it’s nice to have it there nonetheless). I’m trying to create the curriculum on Github, and, while I guess I can link to the individual assignments, I would prefer a more integrated approach. I use Github Classroom with my 2nd year and AP classes, but I don’t want that kind of cognitive overhead in my intro course.
• Getting everything in there and documenting it. I teach in Texas where we have K-12 standards for CS. The CS1 standards (called TEKS in Texas) are kind of all over the place. I need to figure out better ways of incorporating the non-programming parts of the standards into my class. We have talked about computing ethics, open source software, and the like just a little each of the past two years. I would really like to hit that a little more if we can. We used Linux in my classroom this year after the first semester, so we talked a little bit about operating systems, viruses, and security, but again not in much detail or depth. We did a brief foray into MakeCode/Javascript but did not discuss other programming languages beyond the (false)dichotomy of compiled/interpreted. I’m sure there are another handful of standards that we either barely touched on or left out all together.
• Information delivery: what is the best medium to pass on information to students? Students tend to avoid reading carefully, like the plague. I really dislike full class teaching, especially when it comes to coding. I find that very few students can actually keep up when I live code. If I provide my code, then they just tune out, thinking they will be able to figure it out when I finally stop talking. I generally make short tutorial videos and put them on Youtube, but that is a problem when the school wifi decides to have a bad day. There are of course advantages and disadvantages to these ways of delivering content. Some combination is probably best.
• Not getting bogged down: This is more about creating the curriculum than teaching it. I tend to overthink assignments, materials, videos, etc. at first. Do I start here, or there, or what about if we did that? It results in a paralysis of choice. I think I just need to start writing, and then worry about organizing later.

Of course all of this begs the question, why make my own stuff? I’m familiar with CodeHS (who are FINALLY switching to Python 3 this summer), Code.org, CodeCombat, etc. But for the past 13 years of teaching, I’ve always had more success making my own teaching materials than using someone else’s. I like the freedom it provides. While it is definitely time consuming, I find that I’m not able to deliver someone else’s lessons with the same gusto as my own. Maybe it’s just my imagination.

Honestly, I would be interested if anyone is familiar with an open-source project to build a high school computer science curriculum (lessons, activities, etc. not just a book) with Python as the language. I didn’t find anything after a few Google searches. I’m aware of the EDU-SIG resources at python.org, but many of the free resources on that page are either dead links or go to projects that are/have ended.

For now, I only have the first few days’ activities loosely planned (with solutions of course). Once I get a bit further, I plan on sharing with the world to anyone who wants to use it or contribute to it. But like I said, planning ahead is hard, so we’ll see how far I can get before the new school year is upon us.