Birmingham Retro (22/07/2020)

[ChrisOwen101]

In the run up to the Fundamentals being taught for a second time in Birmingham the team wanted to have a round of changes

From @ultraasi-atanas

• We need to make them comfortable with variables, we see that’s a problem in class 1, best practice, how these work, visualise variables! Show demonstrate over and over again.
• We need to make them comfortable with functions, same as above (talk to Shukri about her report)
• Level the playing field
• Teach problem solving - Problem decomposition, breaking down problems - e.g. instead of writing a function to calculate the age by a given birthyear for an array of birthyears (steps: calculate one birth year, calculate the whole array, put the whole thing in a function format)
• Don’t let yourself being distracted by people who know coding already (we have about 20 of these in class 1) stay focused on the needs ot people who haven’t coded before (how to do this I don’t know - ideas welcome)
• Watch the teacher trainer videos from Chris - solely asking students for self-assessment of understanding is not a reliable method of measuring understanding
• Fizzbuzz is probably too hard for most people
• Maybe Separate people by skills level in pair work, focus on those bottom end
• Not have enough time teaching but we can make some over the 7 weeks, perhaps shorten some HTML lessons, for example, to talk about variables

General Discussion

• Problem decomposition and solving could be pushed more in this module
• Could we add some interleaved learning through HTML/CSS
• Pushing more teamwork earlier on in the course.
  • "Post in the channel for help".
  • Normalising failure
• More PD work to be added this time round

Extra exercises were used last time (not commitment to having these added but just noting that they were used)

• Fizzbuzz (thought to be too tricky at this point)
• Flip a coin 10 times