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Possibly you've had more students in one go than I've ever had for all the languages I've done put together then. That said: Here's a weird thing that seems to

Possibly you've had more students in one go than I've ever had for all the languages I've done put together then. That said: Here's a weird thing that seems to work (especially while learning): Instead of copy-pasting code, type it into your program by hand. For some reason this helps a lot when trying to understand or debug the code that you are entering. This works equally for those of us who started learning using BASIC on 8-bitters, all the way to Python, Java, or odd things like Siemens SCL. Wrt editors: the times I've taught people, I actually went completely the other way: requiring the first few programs to be written in notepad or nano (depending on OS) . This tends to take the magic out of what the IDE is doing, and makes everything after it much easier. Both of the above would seem to be relatively time-consuming. But oddly enough in practice they can save more time than they consume.

majormjr 6y ago
This is one of the key parts when starting to learn programming. Just typing out everything manually really helps you see the small details that are important when writing code that can get lost when copying from elsewhere. Courses like Learn Python the Hard Way focus on this method and I think it's the best way to go for absolute beginners.
BadInformatics 6y ago
Absolutely, I find this approach gets the right mental gears turning as well. The problem comes up most often with take-home assignments though, where students are more likely to copy-and-paste a couple lines from somewhere because you haven't given them a full program. If anything, an IDE might be better because it'll give more localized feedback and people are more likely to react to the red squiggles :)
franklyt 6y ago
I’m a bit taken aback by this message. My students have never copied and pasted a single line of code aside from their own... I also don’t give homework. If you want to learn on your own, you can, but homework is a massive crutch that I don’t think benefits most people.

majormjr 6y ago

This is one of the key parts when starting to learn programming. Just typing out everything manually really helps you see the small details that are important when writing code that can get lost when copying from elsewhere. Courses like Learn Python the Hard Way focus on this method and I think it's the best way to go for absolute beginners.

BadInformatics 6y ago

Absolutely, I find this approach gets the right mental gears turning as well. The problem comes up most often with take-home assignments though, where students are more likely to copy-and-paste a couple lines from somewhere because you haven't given them a full program. If anything, an IDE might be better because it'll give more localized feedback and people are more likely to react to the red squiggles :)

franklyt 6y ago

I’m a bit taken aback by this message. My students have never copied and pasted a single line of code aside from their own... I also don’t give homework. If you want to learn on your own, you can, but homework is a massive crutch that I don’t think benefits most people.