5. I engage student interest with every lesson.

Engagement with Practical and Personal Relevance

In his book Pre-Suasion, Dr. Robert Cialdini discusses how he begins many of college lectures; with an engaging question (2018). The question is carefully crafted to make his students want to know the answer but he doesn't get straight to it. Instead he'll then go off of another direction to cover the knowledge his students need to know and, hopefully, by the end of the lecture the students will be able to make the connection he sought to impart. The information in between might not be the most riveting details, but that's ok, because his initial suspense already created an environment that would set the stage for students to be engaged with the content. Personal asides, it was enjoyable book with lots of practical information teachers can make use of and definitely earns my recommendation of any teachers to read.

Maybe not every computer science lesson can start with a engaging tale, but surely they can all begin with why the incoming information will be practical and/or personally relevant. Most of my students play games, so it's easy to show how variables are a way for us to store information like a score or lives (Code.org, 2015). Or that a function or method is way to change that score every time an event happens, like Mario jumping on a goomba. However, games are an easy target, and not all of my students are gamers. Two middle school coding teachers, Kelly Paredes and Sean Tibor, discuss a lesson Sean gave where, on a whim, challenged his students to come up with method names from makeup lessons given by popular makeup artist James Charles (2018). The end result was that his students, even the boys in the class, became fully engaged in the lesson and had a much better understanding of methods as they were able to personally relate the to the information.

Engagement through Choice

I may not ever use makeup tutorials to relate to my CS classes (nor am I ruling it out) but I thought giving students a choice of assignment might make for an engaging activity. While exploring compound if-statements using Python in my AP CSP course, I did just this offering students the choice to code up a basic game of rock-paper-scissors or making a sorting algorithm. Leading up to the assignment, we discussed a lot of real-life if-then choices. If the traffic light is certain color, we should drive, slow down, or stop. If we don't stop when red and an officer of the law is present, then ticket!

As for the assignment, I decided to introduce some additional choice and added differentiation. Both assignments had their standard goals, but both had stretch goals as well. Students were given the option to hide the input in rock-paper-scissors and/or track the score in a loop. For the sorting algorithm, students were instructed to place random numbers into a list as opposed to just changing around three variables. In either of the stretch goals, students would have to research coding concepts we had not covered in class. I expected about 10% of the class to go the extra mile and this prediction ended up being correct. But for that 10%, the differentiation made for a more engaging experience for those students that were having an easier time making sense of the content.

I assumed that most students would choose rock-paper-scissors, but about a quarter of the class chose the sorting algorithm, to which I was pleasantly incorrect. In fact, the students that chose the sorting algorithm were mostly made of up of my international students, reminding me that my students are driven my different motivations.