For our fourth round, we’re going to take a look at some teaching tools. To get started, please go to Mark Guzdial’s blog and look at everything he has posted since January 2, 2012. Half the articles are fairly ephemeral (conference announcements and the like), but I think the rest will give you a very good overview of the state of the computing education landscape. Once you’ve done that (which I expect will take a couple of hours), please:
- Watch Bret Victor’s “Inventing on Principle” video.
- Read his “Learnable Programming” essay.
- And then read commentary by Mark Guzdial and Neil Brown.
Using all of that, and what you’ve learned in the previous three rounds, your task is to create a short lesson on something of your choice using the IPython Notebook. Your lesson should start with a small concept map (but not as small as Matt Davis’s) with the one key idea you’re teaching at the center, and half a dozen related ideas that you’re not around it. At the bottom, please include a brief explanation of:
- how you would use the notebook in front of a class when teaching live;
- how learners would go through it on their own outside of class; and
- how your use of the IPython Notebook relates to one or more of the things you encountered in Mark’s blog or Bret Victor’s demo and essay.
Please post your results by Thursday, October 25, and we’ll discuss them in an online meeting on Monday, October 29.
And looking ahead: in our fifth and final round, I will ask you to make a video of yourself teaching your lesson in front of a handful of people, and post it to Smarter Cookie for feedback.