Last week, we organized CS workshops for teenagers (15-16 y.o.) who did not know anything in CS/programming. For the programming part, we used PLM (Python language) and it was a success.
Few observations:
the use of "not" does not seem to be natural. Until the exercice concerning while, it is not useful. We were wondering if it could be a good idea to create an exercise dedicated to the negation of conditions (for the moment, we do not know what, maybe something with inverted buggles from an other world)
for the exercise where buggle has to go forward, to take a bagel, then going back, lots of students were frustated not being able to use "backward()".
when observing students doing the exercises, they quickly skip the exercise text (they look at the demo, then they try without reading attentively). As a result, they are sometimes stuck. For instance, in the exercise where many buggles are present, it was not clear for them that they had to write the code for one buggle and not for all. If they had read more carefully the exercise, it would not have been a problem, but the thing is that almost all students were stuck. I do not know how to do to avoid that, but maybe a warning/message in the code pane (i.e. when the exercise is hidden) could be a good solution (only when there is a new behaviour, or when there is something new and specific).
Well, this feedback is not very helpful, but it was a way to say "good work guys, you made some teenagers happy last week, thank you!" :)
Hello,
Last week, we organized CS workshops for teenagers (15-16 y.o.) who did not know anything in CS/programming. For the programming part, we used PLM (Python language) and it was a success.
Few observations:
Well, this feedback is not very helpful, but it was a way to say "good work guys, you made some teenagers happy last week, thank you!" :)