I'm curious how we can translate research in computing education to open tools, content and practices:
→ How can we balance speed and rigor to best serve learners and educators?
AI can now write and explain code, but people still need to understand and maintain this code. To adapt, programming education must center code comprehension, discussion, and review instead of code writing. Research finds this is also the most effective way to learn programming, with or without access to AI.
If we want programming education stay relevant and open doors to opportunity, we need a new open philosophy of programming education that centers comprehension-first learning, peer-led study, easy content authoring, and offline study.
Curious about using or contributing to any of these resources? Send me an email!
Click to learn more about my open education projects
De Nepo: Open Ed: A collection of evidence-based resources & tools for computing education. Some highlights:
- Study Lenses (demo, source, spiritual successor): A plugin-based learning environment for generating comprehension exercises from code. The following tutorials are designed for Study Lenses.
- Welcome to JS: A practical introduction to programming focusing on program comprehension and communication skills.
- Inside JS: A deeper look inside JavaScript including expression-level debugging, unit testing, DOM I/O, and reverse-engineering.
- Behavior, Strategy, Implementation: Explore and practice a wide variety of approaches for solving & reviewing coding challenges.
- Separation of Concerns: Learn how to plan and collaborate on a software project with code-splitting and file/folder conventions based on the code's role in the program.
Software as a Second Language: A new project to organize and package De Nepo materials for program comprehension, designed around four levels of time investment:
- Quick Wins: Teaching or study techniques you can pick up in under an hour.
- Tools: Guides for adopting tools like Study Lenses that help understand any code you are working with.
- Content: Lesson plans, exercises, and references that can be incorporated into an existing curriculum.
- Curriculum: Guides & resources for redesigning programming curricula around comprehension-first learning objectives.
InTechgration: I am helping them to adopt/adapt De Nepo materials, and giving Instructional design & curriculum packaging advice for WDX-180
Blocks to Text: Thoughts about helping learners transition from blocks to text. Also an experiment in hosting essays+slides+demos in one GitHub organization.
JS for Open Computing Education. A presentation from FOSDEM '19 with some principles for designing realistically open computing education. The code is wonky, the ideas are solid.
Micromaterials: Open learning resources that are focused,free, give automated feedback, and (ideally) generate endless practice.
I've always loved language, linguistics and reading more than I liked playing on computers. So when I program I think more about the writing, the language and the rhetorics than what I'm building. I also think rhetorical situations are a great starting point for teaching programming.
My main computery hobby is snippetry → What can you do with under 40(ish) lines at a time?
Let's talk, together we can build things we could never imagine alone.
fun links
alert(eval(eval((recurseval = 'eval(prompt("yolo", recurseval) || recurseval)'))));
If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript has influenced my programming life more than any other single source. How to Draw a Bunny is in second place.
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You may have heard this before:
Now try this on for size:
Wait. How could you have a hammer if everything is a nail? And wouldn't you be a nail too‽ |
Many years ago this question captured me:
I got stuck at "discipline". It's not so hard to define existing disciplines, but how do you know when you're looking at a new one? or at a hidden discipline? "Discipline" started to make sense when instead of looking for a single thing, I saw combinations of these two things:
I now think of disciplines as conventional combinations. Disciplines have a conventional type of question, and conventional methods for answering them. So what does it mean to be an expert in a discipline? I think it means you've developed the intuition to ask certain questions and are very good at certain methods for finding their answers. no more, no less. |
Where do unexpected questions come from? And how can you find an answer to a question no one understands yet? Conventional disciplines may have constrained themselves to asking questions for which they already now how to search answers. But what if you reject known constraints and set new ones? You'd have to ask unknown questions and find unexpected ways to answer them. |
Try replacing "question" with "problem", and "answer" with "address":
Listening and empathy are the keys to finding problems you couldn't know exist. Collaborative design is the way to find answers you never expected were possible.
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Here's the question I've spent a few years trying to answer:
Rephrased as a problem:
Hold on. What does it even mean to teach programming? Maybe it means first teaching students to ask questions that can be answered with code. I certainly haven't found the answer yet, but I do have lots of ideas. Let's compare notes. |
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