My teacher taught the course mainly through labs. We would get a lesson taught to us through a powerpoint, then have to apply it through a lab. These labs were essentially cookbooks for programs, and were made so that each successive lab would have less hand-holding.
Here's an excerpt from an early lab.
"There is a folk rule stating you should only date someone who is at least seven years older than than half your age. For example, an 18 year old needs to date somebody at least 16 years old ( 7 + ( 18 / 2 ) ).
Produce a program that first prompts and reads an integer for a variable named age. The program then computes and displays the age of the youngest person for whom dating meets the folk rule."
Now, for contrast, here are some instructions from a later lab.
"You will complete the PlayList.java file which contains some method stubs for you. When you are finished you will need the following completed:
- Instance Variable
- Song[] list
- Two Constructors
- default constructor used to set the instance variables to default values
- initialization constructor used to set the instance variables
- Accessor and Modifier Methods for Instance Variable
- addSong(int x, Song s)
- method to add a song to the playlist
- getSong()
- method to get a song from the playlist
- public int numSongs()
- method to get the number of songs in the playlist
- totalLength()
- method to get the total length of the playlist specified in seconds
- removeArtist()
- method to remove any songs from the specified artist
- removeLength()
- method to remove any songs longer than the length specified
- shuffle()
- method to shuffle the order of the playlist - use the card shuffling example from the arrays presentation to help
- equals()
- I am providing you the equals method
- toString()
When you have completed PlayList.java, you can use PlayListRunner.java to test your program. This is a completed file to help you test your program."
We can see that the later lab not only provides less guidance, but also is more complex, asking the student to program multiple methods that can interacts with each other. I think my teacher did a great job of choosing labs that built on each other and giving us challenging opportunities (in the labs) to use our knowledge. Another thing I think my teacher excelled at was communicating with his students. He sent out emails all the time to remind us of due dates and was very accessible during school and before. If we had a problem, we could always ask him for help.
The parts that were most frustrating to me about the class were the quizzes and worksheets. I wish we would go over commonly missed questions on them in class. I realize that students can come in during lunch or before school starts to discuss the quizzes or worksheets in class, but I feel as if many of the people who need to do not. Going over just the most frequently missed question on the quiz or a couple questions on the worksheets would be really help students understand the concepts in the class.
What I can do to learn more in the class? I probably need to stop talking to our resident techno-genius, Zolie (pseudonym). That shouldn't be hard though, because I think by now he's moved to California, working for a company there. I should try to stop socializing, and knuckle down to do my work. Not quite sure if I'll be able to though....
