Break down lengthy or elaborate processes into discrete steps that students can perform sequentially. This strategy can be an important tool for success.

This is an essential programming skill that they can apply to almost any problem they have to solve in CS.
You can model this process for students.
- Ask students what components need to go in each part of a 'for loop' first, to help support them in writing well-developed 'for loops.'
- Encourage students to write helper functions as opposed to lengthy, multi-purpose functions by limiting the number of lines a function can be.
- Explain that the process of breaking a problem into pieces is also helpful for solving problems in industry.
It can be easy for teachers—relative experts—to forget how unintuitive or unobvious successful problem-solving strategies are for novice students.
Breaking up larger processes helps students think deliberately about each step while performing complex tasks.
Once you have identified the steps for students, consider naming them memorably, and give students a lot of opportunities to practice them. This allows to see how they generalize to other similar problems.
Extra info from the CS Teaching Tips Team: For example, understanding how a computer executes a line of Java code is an elaborate process.
- We can break this down into discrete steps to help explain the process, for instance:
  - creating new stack frames when methods are called
  - writing the names and values of variables within those stack frames

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