One thing to keep in mind is that topics that seem obvious to you (who presumably has years of experience) are not at all obvious to novices.
Stuff like:
- Which editor should I be using?
- How do I compile code again?
- What's the difference between a class and an instance?
This stuff is obvious to you because you've had years of experience. But these students have taken a couple classes so far. That's not enough experience for this stuff to be obvious or come naturally yet.
So you're going to have to hold their hands a little bit more, especially at the beginning of the course. Spend a class reviewing the stuff you assume they already know, or walking through what you expect them to do.
- "Does everybody have Visual Studio installed?"
- "Okay, for your first assignment, let's make sure you have everything hooked up correctly by compiling and running this basic program."
- "Everybody remember OOP? Who can remind us of what
staticmeans?" - "Your next homework assignment is to take OOP to the next level by..."
I'm not saying you should spend half your course on this catch-up, but spending part of your first class on this, and assigning a few token homework assignments to make sure everybody is on the same page, will go a long way.
Taking a step back, you say that it took you a few weeks to realize that students weren't at the level you thought they were. Why did it take you so long? You should be finding this stuff out as early as possible, and correcting it before you start throwing tests at them. That makes it sound like you were lecturing without really engaging the students or making sure they understood what you were talking about, which is not great.
Instead, you need to make sure you're engaging students by meeting them at their level. Understand that they don't have years of experience, and that they might need to be reminded of things that you think are obvious. A little bit of understanding your students will go a long way here.
manpreet![Tuteehub forum best answer]()
Best Answer
2 years ago
Last semester, I was assigned two classes of C# and assuming them to be well-versed in Programming Fundamentals (PF) and Object Oriented Programming (OOP), I started the course at normal pace. After a few weeks, I took an introductory lab test (it was pretty easy one actually, summation of n Fibonacci terms) and some of the astonishing "discoveries" after my round of the class (about 30 mins after assigning the task) were:
Then, during lecture, I discovered some more facts, like:
It not only left me heart-broken, but also prompted me to teach them OOP's concepts from scratch, which meant that I had to compromise over some advanced topics of .Net
Question
Now my question is that, what should be the correct approach to teach an advanced language like C#, Java to a class given:
Update
As per @Jay and @Buffy's points, here is further explanation:
Looking forward to your interesting inputs. Thanks.