Two of our teachers are taking a week long programming in Python professional development for teachers at the local university. I did this PD course last summer and enjoyed it but then I am a math and computer geek. I asked them how it went on the first day. One immediately said “Why do all college CS profs think everyone loves math? Want to turn kids off to programming? Throw math at them.” The first programming problem they did was the famous (or infamous depending on your point of view) quadratic formula program. The other teacher was of the same opinion. As a programming teacher and a math teacher I have to agree. Novice programmers do not want to deal with math. Many novice programmers are not happy with math. Novice programmers want to see the fun stuff about programming. There are options that are more fun. The ever popular turtle graphics. Admittedly not all languages lend themselves to turtles but most have something. Turtle graphics is one of the reasons I like Small Basic as a starter language. Lots of fun turtle projects. Another nice option is silly sentences. One of my favorites is using a file of Shakespeare’s insults in a sentence. Sort of fun and not math. Eventually programming is going to get to math problems. After all, the quadratic formula is a great programming problem but keep it for when the kids have seen that programming is not just math stuff.
A good intro to programming teacher has to have a pretty expansive list of “fun” programming assignments. Things that will not turn off the novices that are in the class just to see what programming is all about. Do some fun stuff and they night hang around for the second semester and then the hook might be set.
One of the issues with this PD is it is put on by university professors who have no idea what is happening in the K-12 classroom. They do not understand the dynamics, mentality, needed inspiration, and a thousand other things that seperate K-12 students from university students. They are purely content driven. The PD turns into teaching Python, not how to teach Python. And the methods used in the PD to teach Python are not transferable to the 9-12 classroom. Oh well, the PD is free and you take what you can get or, as my father used to say, “Do not look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Garth's CS Education Blog 
June 26, 2019 at 12:08 am |
Very timely! I am in a college professor led PD this week on Cryptography. I have a math major from back in the 80s and the math needed for this class is long forgotten! I initially thought that this was not going to be anything I could take into a high school classroom, but the labs are interesting and something that I can take in as a demonstration for my classes.
June 26, 2019 at 3:59 am |
Garth, have you sent this critique to the organizers (and funders) of the professional-development program? I think that they need the feedback.
June 26, 2019 at 2:53 pm |
The organizers are the people teaching it. It is an NSF grant. I talk to the folks teaching this all the time. It is like trying to explain the color red to someone born blind. They are all extremely intelligent and cannot connect that not all high school students dig programming/CS. The methods needed to teach K-12 is not in their realm of thought. Great people but teaching is just not their expertise.