Imagine a cake, your favorite cake. Has your interest been piqued?
“Start with Cake” has proved an effective teaching strategy for Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel in her introduction-level statistics classes. In her talk “Teaching Computing via Visualization,” she lays out her classroom approaches to helping students maintain an interest in coding despite its difficulty. Just like a cooking class, a taste of the final product can motivate students to master the process. Cetinkaya-Rundel, therefore, believes that instead of having students begin with the flour and sugar and milk, they should dive right into the sweet frosting. While bringing cake to the first day of class has a great success rate for increasing a class’s attention span (they’ll sugar crash in their next classes, no worries), what this statistics professor actually refers to is showing the final visualizations. By giving students large amounts of pre-written code and only one or two steps to complete during the first few class periods, they can immediately recognize coding’s potential. The possibilities become exciting and capture their attention so that fewer students attempt to vanish with the magic of drop/add period. For the student unsure about coding, immediately writing their own code can seem overwhelming and steal the joy of creating.
Example of a visualization Cetinkaya-Rundel uses in her classes
To accommodate students with less background in coding, Cetinkaya-Rundel believes that skipping the baby steps proves a better approach than slowing the pace. By jumping straight into larger projects, students can spend more time wrestling their code and discovering the best strategies rather than memorizing the definition of a histogram. The idea is to give the students everything on day one, and then slowly remove the pre-written coding until they are writing on their own. The traditional classroom approach involves teaching students line-by-line until they have enough to create the desired visualizations. While Cetinkaya-Rundel admits that her style may not suit every individual and creating the assignments does require more time, she stands by her eat-dessert-first perspective on teaching. Another way she helps students maintain their original curiosity is by cherishing day one through pre-installed packages which allow students to start playing with visualizations and altering code right away.
Not only does Cetinkaya-Rundel give mouth-watering cakes as the end results for her students but she also sometimes shows them burnt and crumbling desserts. “People like to critique,” she explains as she lays out how to motivate students to begin writing original code. When she gives her students a sloppy graph and tells them to fix it, they are more likely to find creative solutions and explore how to make the graph most appealing to them. As the scaffolding falls away and students begin diverging from the style guides, Cetinkaya-Rundel has found that they have a greater understanding of and passion for coding. A spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down.
Post by Lydia Goff