Ok fedi, help me out:
If you're teaching any kind of CS course at a high school level, do you have students keep a paper notebook? What kinds of things do they do by hand vs on the machine? Do you have specific assignments aside from larger projects/programming?
I'm doing some work today on revamping my web development course from last year and could use ideas.
@brianb my first year I tried web dev and gave up at the HS level. I immediately changed everything and now my intro material is all in TIC-80 using Fennel. I cannot stress enough how good lisp syntax is for learning...
I don't do any notes specifically. The code is their notes mostly. But I do continue building physical analogs to introduce concepts. Most recently I realized an exercise with a Cartesian grid on the floor and walking between points could go a really long way in reasoning about the computer screen and drawing things on it.
Learning happens from the inside out so any way you can get a student to /feel/ the concept is more powerful than notes could ever be. CS gets very abstract so quickly that it's easy to loose your conceptual footing, so anchors in reality are profound
@brianb Personally I believe that notes are valuables as long as lessons focus on core concepts (for example which things you should consider to keep a web application accessible) rather than rote learning of APIs (something I often found at school, in training courses and Udemy and never enjoyed).
In the many years I spent learning technologies I noticed that I'd rather have instructors focusing on the basics and then have authoritative sources I can use as reference material for syntax and APIs specifics.
@brianb https://www.csunplugged.org is very interesting, but not really suitable for web development and possibly aimed at a slightly younger audience.
@brianb I'm not a teacher but used to be a software dev for ~15 years. I'd have pen/paper nearby at all times to sketch UIs/write out complicated stuff/remind myself where I paused after people barged into my office. It worked well for me because I'm a visual learner and it might help some students too, but I have no idea how you'd grade it.
@brianb I’m not sure, but I think @futurebird has some thoughts on this. 👆
@brianb HS CS teacher (11yrs) here.
Our syllabus has 2 papers, theory and "problem solving" Almost all have pen & paper final exams, no calculators.
Binary, hardware, logic , dns lookups, flowcharts, data models, class diagrams, concepts behind stacks, queues etc, all require pen & paper. Coding is done in an exam board defined pseudocode dialect, which someone implemented on the web.
There is some research indicating pen & paper is better for recall, but neither I nor the school enforce it
1/
@brianb Paper? Hand-writing notes can be beneficial for a student but it's not something I would force on anyone. I might suggest it but I wouldn't grade it.
@brianb i don't have them take paper notes, instead they use Obsidian for notes, but you could do these things on paper too
The first thing is a Coding Vocab note. Every week I ask the class what new words they have come across and we all add it to the coding vocab.
Then from that list I ask them what they want to take notes on and they vote. I guide them a little bit and take liberties. Ex: they vote to take notes on "else". Then we would write notes on conditionals.
@brianb oh and most of the time I have them submit a pdf of their notes for credit to ensure they are participating
@cubeofcheese Awesome. These are terms they find in their own researching/troubleshooting/debugging? Or are there required elements they read/watch for each session?
@brianb yeah! It's a mix. A lot of them are things I show them when coding. Then we go back want take formal notes on the concept later.
They also discover new words from errors and research
@brianb I teach some kids at the low-high school level; however, I do it online, so I have no clue if they keep physical notebooks or not. From what I've seen though: leaving comments in code we work on together is a very popular way of keeping track of links/topics/clarifications/homework, and modelling a problem visually before coding is quite underrated considering how much it helps. 😅 (...so maybe I should have them do things by hand more often 🤔)
@bojidar_bg what do you have students using for their code? Last year, we used vs code and I introduced them to git, but that was a stretch. I did a lot of downloading zip files and I'd like to clean that workflow up as well.
@brianb I'm currently making heavy use of p5.js's web editor—it's nice to have something easy to pick up, even if it's limiting in the long run, as setting up development environments on arbitrary student machines is a pain.
Ideally, I'd love to move to some sort of self-hosted web-based IDE, so I can ensure that everybody is logged in and has autosaves enabled (...many a project have been lost to infinite for loops and similar gremlin 😅).
@brianb That said, VS Code with Git is what I go for after we get past frontend JS and get to deal with server-side code and build tools. 🙂 ..Wonder if setting up CI/CD with Git pushes early on might help clean up the zip file trouble... (homework isn't done until it's working on the "prod" server 😂:)
@bojidar_bg Yeah, we didn't do ANY server-side work last year. I did throw a simple API endpoint up so they could learn how to use fetch, but that was it.
We're on Chromebooks, so the VS Code web app worked well. They would then zip up their resources and submit to Google Classroom. I would download the whole directory and run a local HTTP server to navigate each project and grade it. It was quite the process.
@bojidar_bg I briefly looked at Github Codespaces, but that's a whole ball of worms for beginners as well.
My IT director is all for the class and has offered to set up an internal VPS to run whatever I want, so I'm wondering if there's something like self-hosted repl.it or glich.com that would host all of their files and let them submit links to finished work.
@brianb While handwritten paper notes have been shown to be more helpful for most people in memory formation, most people doesn't mean everyone. What pedagogical goals do you have in asking for paper notes, and what alternatives are acceptable for students for whom paper notes don't work for whatever reason?
PS: you may also need to teach them how to take useful paper notes. There are a number of standard formats, and many students may enter class not having learned any of them.
@brianb I’m now teaching a visual design course and have banned digital devices in the class, even for note taking. One student commented they hadn’t used pen and paper in ages. I explained we KNOW from studies pen to paper is best for retention of concepts. My deal with them: I give them time to take notes, not speed through lectures, slow down when asked. Three weeks in, their feedback is overwhelmingly positive.
@brianb I had my web design students keep hand-written notes on the things they felt were important to remember or had to look up, questions they had (and encouraged them to fill in the answer if they came upon it themselves), details about their process, successes, failures. The notebook was part of the requirement for exercises and therefore grade. I tried my best to be flexible, I just didn’t want them using AI to create a finished product (which some did anyway 😕).
@rinkside ok, so it was more of a journal/notebook for their own work not so much for note taking.
Do you use formal instruction? Are you teaching concepts (this is a tag, this is an attribute, etc) or doing live code with narration? Something else?
@brianb Pretty much a journal, but it could include almost anything.
I kind of do it all. Introduce basic concepts, then focus on lots of live coding, but very scripted. I purposely introduce hiccups (with notice) to demonstrate how something breaks and how to fix it.
Exercises were half a “walkthrough” and half “now you try!” I felt the need to balance proper fundamentals without killing creativity — as long as they “color within the lines,” we’re good. 😊
@brianb I should note… this was a university course, but most (if not all) my students had zero experience in programming. I see no reason it couldn’t work in high school. It was also in a School of Communication, so we focused more on publishing static pages to develop grasp of fundamentals. Front-end JS was fully taught in a separate course.
@rinkside do you have a syllabus I could look at? I was uneasy about JS last year but wanted to include some, not sure if I would do it again, but my scope was kind of thin without it.
@brianb Feel free to look me up on com.miami.edu, shoot me an email. I’d be happy to share syllabus, details, chat via zoom if interested. 😊 (Will check work email on Monday.)
@brianb I teach programming courses to university students. I have designed my courses using the “flipped” classroom approach in which I record my lectures and tutorials as videos and we do discussion and lab during class sessions. So, I doubt that my students take very many notes at all. If they want to refer back to what I said, they just play the video again.
@_KevinTrainor so you videos tend to be conceptual (this is an object, here's how it works) or procedural (do this to instantiate a class...) or both/and? What kinds of information are you wanting them to get from the videos?
@brianb I make 2 kinds of videos: lectures and tutorials. They include both conceptual and practical content. Lectures have quite a bit of conceptual content. To the extent that I show code, I tend to concentrate on snippets that make a particular point. Tutorials are mostly practical. Programs that I show tend to fit a program design pattern that I want the students to master. I show the whole program. I occasionally make conceptual points that are illustrated by the code at hand.
@brianb I know a lot of early college students use Notion to keep track of notes, but I haven’t seen many use paper
@Ashedryden What class do you teach? What kinds of notes are they keeping?
@brianb I don’t teach, I just graduated with a CS bachelors last May
@Ashedryden Got it, so way more theory and conceptual material. I think that's the balance I'm trying to strike - how much theory to work into skill development. Last year was a lot of skill based work, so it wasn't much note taking.
