- Keeping students active helps students’ focus and attention, and provides students’ with a deeper understanding of concepts.
- This technique is shown to be more effective than lectures that last for 15 minutes or more.
- From: Bonwell, C. and Eison, J. Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom., ASHE ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1, Washington, D.C.: The George Washington University, School of Education & Human Development, 1991.
- These activities are worth the time they take to prepare because they support diversity by helping:
- students with different learning styles.
- level the playing field for students without previous technical experience.
- provide motivation for learning beyond receiving good grades.
- Doing active exercises throughout the course—every day if possible—reinforces that class time is not passive.
- Make sure to set aside plenty of time when developing these activities.
- It often takes more time to develop a well-designed, active exercise than a traditional lecture.
- They also typically take more class time to run than a traditional lecture uses.
- Many active exercises already exist, with run times varying run times (from very short to open-ended) to fit your needs.
- Search through the CS Teaching Tips repository using keywords like: games, toys, stories, and activity
- Example active exercise shared by Brandon Rodriguez with CS Teaching Tips: Have students sort large number signs their classmates hold using different sorting algorithms to better visualize different sort algorithms.
- Use CS Unplugged for activities that don’t require a computer.
- Check out the activities included in Head First books include many activities.
- More in-depth guidelines.
- Create more time for active exercises; have students watch videos that cover basic information (i.e., flipping the classroom).
- Note from CS Teaching Tips: Check out Cadle and Duvall’s other tip on creating videos for a flipped classroom.