This is the second post, in a series in which I intend to share my experiences teaching processing two groups of students in the Faculty of Arts ASAB. The first group is formed, mostly by students of 5 and the second semester students in seventh. most of the fourth semester students have no previous experience programming and seventh semester students learn basics of ActionScript.
Today I want to talk about things that I think I found most problematic for my students in their learning process, some are general in our country, others are particular to some students.
The first is language. Just because programming languages \u200b\u200bare written in English there is a difficult barrier to cross for many students, it's even fair to say that for the majority. Words for a person with an adequate command of English refer to particular incidents or images, for a person who has a rudimentary English does not mean nothing without a translation, sometimes the translation is not completely correct and can lead to misunderstandings. Processing is a very easy language to learn, if I draw a circle write "ellipse", if I draw a triangle write "triangle" this is not a language made life difficult for the artists. Problems arise when it comes to talking about "while", "for" with students who had never heard these words, for those after the explanation "while" is not an everyday word, but a computer command. I must confess that this is what has given me the most trouble with some students as the problem previously solved for mnemonic Anglo-speaking, persists for those who lack this knowledge. One of the plans I have for implementing the next semester is to decorate the room with the glossary, as they do in the institutes of languages, hoping that these words are made daily before addressed in the context of the class. However I would like to know any programming language in English.
Another problem with which I found is the impossibility, for some students to understand the modular nature of programming languages. I usually start each class with the explanation of a particular structure, function or other item. In these accounts usually I make use of codes that I have written specifically for the class (nothing complicated) and at the end of the explanation is always a couple of students who want to copy into their notebooks, my examples, to repeat exactly unchanged. When I presented these exercises, I try to show them how to change everything by changing some parameters, introducing randomness or simply deleting a function and yet seem not to understand the possibilities as a language processing offers to be as modular and simple. It is important to emphasize that students who began studying scratch group have not had this problem has been the group that started processing directory for those is more difficult to understand the modular aspect of programming languages. Just this week we begin the exploration of classes and objects, which has developed a special interest in students for this concept (modular) and interesting ideas have been raised about possible final projects. Another interesting thing I noticed is that students tend to modify codes downloaded from the internet tend to get faster all this and have a learning curve even higher. Another of my ideas for next semester, as we begin the agenda of the material with scratch, is to foster the involvement of codes and not merely the independent creation of such.
Next week will continue this post. I want to talk about the importance of independent work of the student, the preconceptions of students to programming, the fear of math and code. And the last post in this series will be on the benefits and developments I've seen in my students at this time.
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