It occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve seen one technique for teaching programming talked about online much (if ever). In my HS CS class, Mr. Stueben gave regular (dead-tree) quizzes where we had to predict what a piece of code would do, but where the code was purposefully formatted in misleading ways.

I don’t know if it’s actually good pedagogy, but I do think it was very effective for me and made me understand very early on that what the code looks like is not actually related to what it actually does.

@alpha yesssss. I had the same. And I had a few they were multiple choice with _really good_ false answers if you just kinda skimmed the code.

@alpha I had a high school CS teacher with the same name who did the same thing... I wonder if we went to the same high school?

@BrianZiman No way, TJHSST?

@cdownie Yup, Mr. Stueben used every trick in the book, and in C, there are lots of them! Semicolons, braces, and whitespace all used to deceive.

@alpha Class of '96.

@BrianZiman ‘01 here. 😮

@alpha I thought I recognized a kindred programming talent. We had some really fantastic teachers.

@BrianZiman Kind of funny, just last month, I attended a wedding for friends of mine, and discovered that the bride (who I had known for a little while) also went to TJ (‘06). Small world!

@alpha I had to do this in university and I hated it, but I've come around. Part of being a good programmer is having an interpreter in your head so you can eval code without running it

@tahnok I didn’t have strong feelings about it at the time (mostly since I was so young), but looking back, it was an invaluable experience.