What's really rotten in Turing?

[CentiZen]

I agree that there are some idiot teachers that don't know loop from while, but don't paint a bad picture for all of them.

I mean, last semester I had a CS class with a brand new teacher to the school. HE WAS AWESOME!!! He'd been using computers since punch cards, and stayed with it ever since. He got his hands on all of the schools old hardware (they did some upgrades this year) and we built our own computers out of them. Granted, the computers were not the greatest (900mhz, 256 ram, 10 gig HD) but they were ours, and the school had no control over them. I'd always known that I wanted to go into computers as a career,but I didn't know what exactly I wanted to do. It was because of him that I decided to apply to college (accepted!) for becoming a system admin, and one day becoming a teacher, and like him, become an awesome teacher one day.

[BigBear]

insectoid @ Wed Jan 28, 2009 5:27 pm wrote:

I think a big problem is that a lot of CS teachers don't actually have teaching degrees. Most schools are so desperate for a CS teacher that they hire old programmers who don't know the first thing about teaching, or who's coding experience is very outdated.

Who says you need a teaching degree to teach have you not learned stuff from a friend/family member without one?

[Savage Reindeer]

insectoid @ Thu Jan 29, 2009 7:50 pm wrote:

My grade 10 teacher, however...

Something was wrong with that guy...absent minded? He was one of those teachers who used to program but can't teach. We used to play pranks on him. I think I've told this one before, but what the hell, I'll say it again.

So, some people were bored. It was like, the 3rd day on strings (he managed to drag a 5 minute lesson over several days), and we decided to have a little fun. So, the teacher had to leave the class for a bit. Some of the kids went to his overhead ("You never touch my overhead. It is mine, just stay away from this area"), and unplugged the power. They also turned the switch off. When he went came back, he tried to turn it on, saw that the plug was out, plugged it back in. It still didn't turn on, and he couldn't figure out what was wrong. So he took the clear overhead with black text in font 12 and held it up to the black blackboard and started pointing at things to try to keep teaching.


It was a good day.

Do we have the same teacher?

[Thaviel]

apparently I got lucky, my CS teacher was a programmer that decided he didn't like big city life and wanted to teach. He states over and over to all the kids who come in that know C++ or python "I'm going to teach you how to solve problems, differently languages are just syntax you can learn syntax in a few days, It's the ability to solve problems that I'm here to teach you." and he does his course is pretty close to open ended and he help's people find their own solutions.

[ProgrammingFun]

My CS teacher was a civil engineer in China, then a software engineer in Canada for 7 years before switching to teaching. He was amazing in everything except Turing (he had never heard of it). He taught us most things using what he knew about Java (ha was amazing at Java). He was very carefree about us learning and we spend 9/10 of class time on Halo. He would even watch us play and the most he ever did was suspend us from the computer for that one day (although he usually forgot).

[DtY]

ProgrammingFun @ Mon Mar 15, 2010 7:34 pm wrote:

My CS teacher was a civil engineer in China, then a software engineer in Canada for 7 years before switching to teaching. He was amazing in everything except Turing (he had never heard of it). He taught us most things using what he knew about Java (ha was amazing at Java). He was very carefree about us learning and we spend 9/10 of class time on Halo. He would even watch us play and the most he ever did was suspend us from the computer for that one day (although he usually forgot).

So did you actually, uh, learn computer science? I'd be pretty pissed off to get a teacher whose not teaching.

[ProgrammingFun]

Yea we did learn (he did give us pretty comprehensive lessons)...

My point was that he made the class fun by being so carefree.

[yetiboy]

Hi folks.

I'm a CS teacher (1 course a year) with some programming experience in university - at least enough to remember how to program in a few languages if I spend enough time going over the code again.

I'm teaching an introductory programming course right now. I started off with basic problem solving skills (ie. word puzzles and such) and just finished off having students work with Scratch - kind of a basics of programming without having to worry about typos. They had some fun, made some games, etc.

Now I'm getting into Turing for the rest of the semester. I'd like to start off with a "learn to walk before you run" strategy. I've read a few articles about how students are able to learn programming languages much faster and have a better understanding of the structure of the language if they actually start off by reading samples of code and learning how to decipher them before actually coding themselves. Kind of like learning a new spoken language, it's much easier to learn how read it before learning how to write it.

I really like the suggestion of diving into a complicated example (like Minesweeper) immediately after learning the basics so they can learn that way too. But I'd like to get them to read a few samples of code first. Anyone have any simple programs that are semi-fun once run that my students can try to play with? I'd like to start off with simple variables then decisions then loops.

Thanks for the help, and I'm glad this resource is available for both myself and my students - I've already given them a link to the Walkthrough, I'm sure it will be a great help to them.

[Dan]

The Turing Submissions section is full of student created works in Turing and might have some nice examples: http://compsci.ca/v3/viewforum.php?f=48

There are also the FP contest entries which are students final projects (tho not all in turing):

http://compsci.ca/v3/viewforum.php?f=62
http://compsci.ca/v3/viewforum.php?f=49
http://compsci.ca/v3/viewforum.php?f=69

[SNIPERDUDE]

Also, the Turing Walkthrough is a great way to brush up on all the useful functions Turing provides.

As for example programs, there's a sticky thread in the Turing Submissions forum for the best submissions to date. A lot of innovative stuff has been posted there.

[DemonWasp]

The Turing Tutorials section is also full of small example programs that could be used as samples to try reading.

You should probably, at least once, hand half the students in the class a program with proper commenting style, and hand the other half the exact same program without any comments at all, then ask the students to give the output of the program. Your students will forever comment their code after this example.

You did mention Minesweeper explicitly, so you've probably already seen my own Minesweeper tutorial (parts 1-4), but in case you hadn't, those are the links. I would appreciate any feedback, positive or negative, on that tutorial, as I am currently writing additional programming tutorials for this site and would like to improve my style / writing / code in any way I can.

Good luck!

[yetiboy]

Thanks all. I'll try out the examples and let you know how things go.

[InfectedWar]

Luckily my computer science and computer engineering teacher is actually qualified and registered, he really emphasizes on modularity and good coding conventions/commenting. Also global variables vs local variables, we also do other languages like prolog and C. Arrg the other week everyone finished up their recursive landscape project (recursion is a pretty cool programming concept) and a little earlier before that we finished up our networking battleship game made in turing (surprisingly the networking in turing was a lot faster than I thought)

[BigBear]

InfectedWar @ Sat Jun 12, 2010 4:18 pm wrote:

Luckily my computer science and computer engineering teacher is actually qualified and registered, he really emphasizes on modularity and good coding conventions/commenting. Also global variables vs local variables, we also do other languages like prolog and C. Arrg the other week everyone finished up their recursive landscape project (recursion is a pretty cool programming concept) and a little earlier before that we finished up our networking battleship game made in turing (surprisingly the networking in turing was a lot faster than I thought)

I hope you do not use global variables

[InfectedWar]

BigBear @ Sat Jun 12, 2010 5:28 pm wrote:

InfectedWar @ Sat Jun 12, 2010 4:18 pm wrote:

Luckily my computer science and computer engineering teacher is actually qualified and registered, he really emphasizes on modularity and good coding conventions/commenting. Also global variables vs local variables, we also do other languages like prolog and C. Arrg the other week everyone finished up their recursive landscape project (recursion is a pretty cool programming concept) and a little earlier before that we finished up our networking battleship game made in turing (surprisingly the networking in turing was a lot faster than I thought)

I hope you do not use global variables

Our cs teacher would fail us if we used globals lol (Unless one was absolutely required)