sean-morris
commented
10 years ago This is awesome feedback. If we could get the TA's in the labs to give this kind of feedback for each lab in a google doc or something it would be really helpful for HS classes.
On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Michael Ball notifications@github.comwrote:
These comments are from a TA this semester, and I think they're good things to keep in mind as we work on updating labs. Length
This is a big one. Very few of my students got past making an acronym/finding the longest word of the sentence, which means that they are never getting to the last three pages of the lab. So the complexity and number of activities might be something that the lab team wants to reexamine. Particularly there are what I think of as points of congestion which might be altered to make the lab more viable. Pluralizing noun phrases part of the time
One of the exercises asks the students to write a block that pluralizes a phrase half of the times you run it. This is fine, except that we have been drilling into them the definition of a function, i.e. that it always returns the same thing. Many of them are at a loss as to how to make a block sometimes return one thing and sometimes another, and things like state and random variables are foreign to them. This meant alot of time was spent on a small and conceptually pretty unimportant task. Giving them more direction for this exercise would go a long way towards clearing up one of the points of congestion Combine (Is the first letter of the word a vowel)
So, Jon mentioned this in an email all it's own and frankly it deserved one. This was hugely hard for students to grasp and it was a big hurdle for them to get past and one that often left them much more frustrated than curious or intrigued. More than anything, the order of the "vowels" list and the "letter 1 of word" confused them, even though the block makes it explicit which input must be a list. Something needs to be done to help give learners the intuition for making the logical leap to "Oh, does this this list of vowels contain the first letter".
Some students had issues imagining the list "a, e, i, o, u" containing the first letter of a word, because obviously the word contained the letter, not the list! As in they didn't get that like, the list containing an equivalent letter was what they were looking for. This really needs to be reworded somehow Unicode
This was a less common issue, but for the acronym finder, many students had trouble with making the connection between unicode and capital/lowercase letters. The lab just says "experiment with the unicode block", and many students seemed not to know what that meant, which stalled out a few pairs. Setting variables
This is a small one, but students regularly did not realize for the first "noun phrase" exercise that they needed to actually like run the set blocks. They would set them up to set the variable to the right thing, but never actually run them, then express confusion when references to those variables did nothing. This might be something an extra sentence in the lab description might alleviate.
Anyway this is just what I noticed and I encourage people to chime in with things that they notice - I feel like it is useful to have this stuff sitting around for future reference.
— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/beautyjoy/bjc-r/issues/64 .
cycomachead
These comments are from a TA this semester, and I think they're good things to keep in mind as we work on updating labs.
Length
This is a big one. Very few of my students got past making an acronym/finding the longest word of the sentence, which means that they are never getting to the last three pages of the lab. So the complexity and number of activities might be something that the lab team wants to reexamine. Particularly there are what I think of as points of congestion which might be altered to make the lab more viable.
Pluralizing noun phrases part of the time
One of the exercises asks the students to write a block that pluralizes a phrase half of the times you run it. This is fine, except that we have been drilling into them the definition of a function, i.e. that it always returns the same thing. Many of them are at a loss as to how to make a block sometimes return one thing and sometimes another, and things like state and random variables are foreign to them. This meant alot of time was spent on a small and conceptually pretty unimportant task. Giving them more direction for this exercise would go a long way towards clearing up one of the points of congestion
Combine (Is the first letter of the word a vowel)
So, Jon mentioned this in an email all it's own and frankly it deserved one. This was hugely hard for students to grasp and it was a big hurdle for them to get past and one that often left them much more frustrated than curious or intrigued. More than anything, the order of the "vowels" list and the "letter 1 of word" confused them, even though the block makes it explicit which input must be a list. Something needs to be done to help give learners the intuition for making the logical leap to "Oh, does this this list of vowels contain the first letter".
Some students had issues imagining the list "a, e, i, o, u" containing the first letter of a word, because obviously the word contained the letter, not the list! As in they didn't get that like, the list containing an equivalent letter was what they were looking for. This really needs to be reworded somehow
Unicode
This was a less common issue, but for the acronym finder, many students had trouble with making the connection between unicode and capital/lowercase letters. The lab just says "experiment with the unicode block", and many students seemed not to know what that meant, which stalled out a few pairs.
Setting variables
This is a small one, but students regularly did not realize for the first "noun phrase" exercise that they needed to actually like run the set blocks. They would set them up to set the variable to the right thing, but never actually run them, then express confusion when references to those variables did nothing. This might be something an extra sentence in the lab description might alleviate.
Anyway this is just what I noticed and I encourage people to chime in with things that they notice - I feel like it is useful to have this stuff sitting around for future reference.