Rubber duck programming

During the year a blog post talked about rubber duck programming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging Getting students to explain to a rubber duck how their program worked, or if they stick a problem and didn't quite know how to fix it. This us where the rubber ducks come in.

Students I have found work well doing peer programming, being able to explain to someone else and have them code it or come up with a solution. In a lot of ways this is what happens in my classroom. The biggest problem is that the assessment doesn't allow for this. Students need to be able to independently demonstrate the skills involved.
How can a student debug their code. Buy using the rubber duck technique they can communicate with, even though it doesn't talk back, being able to explain an idea helps the human brain come up with a solution. I have experienced this, being able to sit down and think clearly about a problem, not have the stress, but time to draw, explain, develop has been one of the best techniques I have developed over the years to sort out tricky problems. I have visual diaries full of drawings, text and ideas to sort out solutions.

So to my students in 2014, we will be rubber ducking solutions.

2010 course

since I am not teaching year 13 programming next year, I have brought some of the course forward to year 12.

I am planning on using the csta curriculum, or parts of it to help teach my students.

Download the Curriculum here (2 MB)

I am planning on starting with the problem solving part of the course first. This is due to the fact that I want to scare some of the students with what could be involved in the course, as with any course with computers students think that they will just be on the internet playing games. This is false.

The first problem is how to break a 200g cadbury chocolate bar into 12 equal pieces, using he least breaks possible, this is sounding like it is going to be a christmas problem that I will use my family to solve.

I also have to remember that there are two other things that have to be done during this time, 1 is the wai care visit, and second is the design of the screen of a software development project for the university of auckland. These are starting to sound like friday challenges. A new challenge every friday to spice the course up?