Alison Wong
Alison is a lecturer at the University of Sydney in Business Analytics specialising in teaching programming, mathematics and machine learning.
She/her
Sessions
Learning to program can be exceptionally challenging for students. So how can we make learning to program easier for our students?
This talk will explore concepts from the literature such as the constructivist theory of education, Bloom’s taxonomy and the worked example effect and discuss how they can be applied to different teaching strategies to help students learn more effectively. Drawing on my own teaching experiences, I will provide some examples of how these concepts can inform teaching practices and guide the development of resources for teaching programming.
The goal of this talk is to encourage other educators to reflect on their own teaching strategies and to consider new approaches that they could implement in their classrooms, whether it be through minor tweaks or a complete redevelopment of their teaching materials.
Beginner programmers often struggle to understand and trace program execution, which is worsened by underdeveloped debugging and testing skills. Beginners may also lack confidence or are easily demotivated, which can hinder learning. To assist students in developing these skills and build confidence we created a set of playful programming challenges and competition using Karel the Robot. The Karel system provides a 2D “grid world” where the Karel character can move and interact with its environment. The 2D world is visualised for students so that they can immediately see how their program changes the environment step by step as well as the final program state. This is in contrast to traditional languages where learners must develop and maintain a mental model of the program state. This talk will cover our approach, preliminary results and feedback from students showing an increase in confidence and interest in programming. We will also share how this approach can be applied to other learning contexts.