I curate CSTeachingTips.org, which has over 1,300 tips for teaching computer science (CS) gathered from interviews with more than 150 CS teachers because I’m passionate about helping teachers expand their strategies to teach CS more effectively.
Full Story
I curate CSTeachingTips.org, which has over 1,300 tips for teaching computer science (CS) gathered from interviews with more than 150 CS teachers because I’m passionate about helping teachers expand their strategies to teach CS more effectively.
I love CS, but my experience learning CS in college was more than a little rocky. In my second semester CS course in Java, I had to late drop the class to avoid failing it! Then, on my second attempt, I got a 5 out of 25 on the first exam!
A few years later, in graduate school, I was *teaching* that same course, and I was desperately in need of ideas to help students who were struggling in the class. Now, having taught 15 offerings of a similar course, I’m still developing new strategies to make the content accessible to all of my students.
As teachers, we often work in relative isolation as we innovate and iterate on new teaching strategies. On CSTeachingTips.org I try to share teachers’ hard-fought insights into teaching CS so that all teachers and students can benefit.
Want to see some example tips for teaching CS? Go to CSTeachingTips.org or follow @CSTeachingTips on Twitter – we tweet out three tips each day.
Do you have some insights into teaching CS to share? Send me an email at lewis@cs.hmc.edu.
I’ll be the first to admit that the 1,300 tips on CSTeachingTips.org can be a bit overwhelming! Probably the most used resources are on the homepage of CSTeachingTips where you can click on the top seven “tip sheets” for topics such as inclusive teaching, lecturing, pair programming, teaching Scratch, and high school student recruitment. If you have volunteers come into your classes, you might provide them with Tips for Volunteers. I made videos for each of the tip sheets, which you can find in my YouTube playlist.
Would you like some CSTeachingTips swag (magnets, stickers, and pens) for your next CSTA meeting? Please email your mailing address and number of attendees.
As a teacher, I find the tips helpful reminders. I sometimes come across a tip that I have forgotten to use in the last few years but can easily re-integrate into my teaching. For students who, like me, find learning CS to be tough, I hope these tips will help you to help them. I think that CSTeachingTips has helped me improve my teaching practice and I hope others find it useful too!
CSTeachingTips.org is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1339404 and 1821136. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
About the Author
Colleen Lewis is the McGregor-Girand Associate Professor of computer science (CS) at Harvey Mudd College. You can learn more about her Scratch resources and CS education research at cs.hmc.edu/~lewis.