Students seem to be getting through the data types lessons with some confusion. It's a lot to get through quickly, and while I don't expect them to leave those lessons experts on the subject, I think we can clarify a bit more so that they're not as confused as to what they are, what they mean and when to use them.
We can try to improve this by adding visuals as well as examples that force the students to play with them a bit more. We could benefit from having more, yet smaller lessons.
For the visuals, we could include things that will help students picture how that data type is stored, or how it grows, or how it's accessed. We don't quite need to go deeper on heap / stack, etc. But something that will help them retain the concepts we're throwing at them a bit. We can also provide more examples that will let them struggle through an exercise a bit so that they remember through the issues they run into.
This is still an intro course, so we don't want to make exercises too complicated. Just complicated enough to ensure they're grasping the concepts in the lessons.
Instead of just suggesting what code to write, we can also have tests that ensure the code they wrote will fulfill a certain spec that we present them.
These are just ideas. We should play with them and see if any of it can improve the lessons .
Students seem to be getting through the data types lessons with some confusion. It's a lot to get through quickly, and while I don't expect them to leave those lessons experts on the subject, I think we can clarify a bit more so that they're not as confused as to what they are, what they mean and when to use them.
We can try to improve this by adding visuals as well as examples that force the students to play with them a bit more. We could benefit from having more, yet smaller lessons.
For the visuals, we could include things that will help students picture how that data type is stored, or how it grows, or how it's accessed. We don't quite need to go deeper on heap / stack, etc. But something that will help them retain the concepts we're throwing at them a bit. We can also provide more examples that will let them struggle through an exercise a bit so that they remember through the issues they run into.
This is still an intro course, so we don't want to make exercises too complicated. Just complicated enough to ensure they're grasping the concepts in the lessons.
Instead of just suggesting what code to write, we can also have tests that ensure the code they wrote will fulfill a certain spec that we present them.
These are just ideas. We should play with them and see if any of it can improve the lessons .