Intro How to teach introductory programming? It is a question that keeps many programming teachers occupied and has been a topic of scientific research from the seventies to more recent days. Not only the choice of programming language and the topics of exercises are of interest, but also the form of teaching. Do we try […]
To Scratch or not to Scratch?!
Plugged or unplugged? There is a lot to be said about how to teach programming, and a lot it said, also by me 🙂 One of the questions is whether we should start programming on the computer immediately, or start with programming lesson without the computers, also called unplugged. And of course I also like […]
Programming is Writing is Programming
Do you know that joke about two little fishes that swim into an older fish? He asks the young fishes how the water is, and they respond: “what’s water?”. The little fishes live and breath water, so they have no clue that it is even a thing. I love this joke and I often try to […]
Coetry
Recently, I have been really interested in the question what programming really is, and how we can practice getting better at it. I explored many weird things, like the relationship between code and painting. I gave a workshop in Cambridge where people got artwork styles, like Rococo, Graffiti and Expressionism, and they had to create an […]
Teaching Software Engineering Principles to K-12 Students: A MOOC on Scratch
There are many many tools, books, games and apps to teach children programming. But in our view they focus way to much on getting the programs to work, and too little on teaching children about software engineering skills: programming is a good way, free of code smells, and easy to read. To address this, we […]
