Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate
into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
— Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen
Tracing control flow (either through control structures, such as if-statements or loops) or through method calls, is hard for beginners.
This episode shows you how to use the debugger to make this clearer.
Concepts discussed: control flow, tracing, breakpoints, debugger
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
— Mahatma Gandhi
After a few days’ pause, here’s another video. And it’s time for a teacher commentary again.
We’ve crammed in quite a bit of material over the last few episodes, and the question now is: Firstly, how do we keep motivation up? But more importantly, do the students actually understand what’s going on?
Some hints and tips what to look out for…
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone,
‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so
many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’
— Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass
Welcome back to the teachers out there. Here are a few remarks about Episodes 4 and 5 of the Joy of Code series.
If you have any questions or comments, let me know in the comments section here on the blog, and I will respond to them in the next episode of the teacher commentary.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become
what they are capable of becoming.
— Goethe
So, here we go, the first instalment of a Teacher Commentary.
If, you may ask, this is the first one, why then is it called “Teacher Commentary 3”?
Fair question, but there is method in this madness. I have decided to number them not sequentially, but in sync with the main Joy of Code episodes. Each Teacher Commentary will get the number of the episode it refers to. Since this commentary talks about episode 3, it is Teacher Commentary 3 (or TC-3, as I will soon start to call them in the headings).
Sometimes the teacher commentaries may not be tightly associated with an episode, but they will still fit in somewhere in the sequence, so they will get whatever number we’re up to in the main episode sequence.
One more rhetorical question before we get to the video: What is a “teacher commentary”?
The TC videos are meant for people who are not only concerned with learning object-oriented programming, or Greenfoot, or Java, but with teaching it. It talks to you as a teacher.
If you are not a teacher, you’re of course welcome to look at it as well, but I’m not sure how interesting this will be for you. Maybe your time is better spent moving on to the next main episode. (You won’t miss anything important.) Your choice.