Alice -> Excel in the APCS Principles Pilot

Midterm follow up, but I'm afraid there isn't anything earth shatteringly new to add. As Beth Simon had promised, the (34) questions on the midterm looked very much like the in-class quiz questions. If you have been following the podcasts, then you know exactly what those questions look like. There were exam questions on virtually all the major topics covered in the course.

Having started to tally the types of topic questions, I began to decide that this effort probably wasn't going to help out those of you who are still interested in details about the excellent midterm results. I believe that the varied analyses of the project that will take place after the course concludes may produce more engaging information than if I list out a topic frequency count.

It is more interesting to briefly discuss what happened in the class sessions in which Beth discussed Excel. As mentioned in a previous post, she went to great lengths to make a smooth transition between Alice and Excel, showing the relationships between two seemingly disparate programs. Alice is an animation oriented programming system and Excel is a spreadsheet program, albeit a now quite sophisticated piece of software. However, in working through complex concepts such as relative vs. absolute addressing (often a tricky distinction for learners), Beth demonstrated through example how an Alice exercise (such as a singing group called The Beetles - no that is not a typo, they were insects) had underlying code similar to formulas they could create in Excel. She discussed similarities and differences in concepts such as loops and conditionals. All very creatively.

This type of teaching supports what the learning literature describes as Transfer - the ability of a learner to successfully apply understanding from one learning experience to another and to rapidly learn new related information. Observing the class it appeared that transfer was likely occurring because students asked intelligent and thoughtful questions about the Excel exercises and remained engaged throughout the lectures.

This is also a good time to note that the course has been supporting two other types of well researched learning that I have not specifically referred to previously:  problem based learning and collaborative learning. If you are not familiar with the research in these areas, an excellent read is How People Learn put out by the National Academies Press. It has become a classic and very accessible reference on learning in educational settings. Well worth the read.

The APCS Principles pilot flies into the last few weeks

The APCS Principles pilot class is moving right along into its final weeks. Several people have been asking how the midterm went - so consider this "part 1" of a response to you.

The midterm grades came back and they were quite good. The average score on the midterm was 86% even though there is evidence that the exam was not particularly easy. In one of my next posts I hope to have some information about the topics and their frequency  on the test to bolster this statement and provide additional information. For now I am able to report that of the well over 500 students in the class, only 4 got a perfect score and approximately 50 scored over 95%. I do not have a statistical standard deviation at this time, but have been told that there was a tight clustering of grades with almost no students falling into the traditional "failure" range.  

In recent weeks Beth Simon has added a new tactic to her exam preparation techniques. After a quiz question and discussion of the correct and incorrect answers she often says: "Write down what you need to remember about this question - for the final exam".  She pauses while they do so. In other words she is helping them prepare by progressively building a study sheet each day during lecture. In addition, to bolster the quality of what goes on these study sheets, part of the class and quiz discussions include asking students to "debug" their choices - to form the habit of mind of learning to problem solve when dealing with a computer, whether it is code or a different type of computing problem.

Students are now well into working on their final project, which will be presented late next week. There will be a contest in which students will get to vote for best projects. The projects should be interesting as there is room for significant student creativity. More on that when it happens.

Finally, and this will also be the subject of a fuller posting, the class has shifted into using Excel. Rather than having a clean break, Beth is making connections between "coding" that students can do in Excel and what they learned in Alice programming. More on that to come as well.

Ok, that wasn't really "finally". There will also be a report soon about a conversation with another visiting scholar. That is truly finally the last item in this post!