Teaching Programming Part 2

It’s taken longer to put up the slides from the second week as there was some significant re-structuring of the content. It takes a lot of concentration to decide how to present comparators and boolean operators – or at least more than I initially thought. What I originally put together and presented last Monday blurred the lines between too many subjects within discrete math and I think it came across as confusing. I hope this version is much clearer.

It’s funny how the knowledge inside your head mixes together. It can become difficult to explain fairly simple subjects without relying on a large base of information assumed to be understood by everyone. You just can’t expect people from an arts background to understand a mathematical explanation. It does force you to understand the information better yourself.

As this was the first time I’ve taught this material, I was expecting there to be rough patches. Overall though, I think it’s going very well, or at least that the feedback I get directly to my face. Our last class is tomorrow evening. How the time flies! I’ve had students say they are sad it’s coming to an end so quickly and I have to agree. It’s amazing how little you can truly cover in 6 hours.

I think the next steps are to work out a longer version of this material and then start looking at where I can teach it.