This Book is for Teachers¶
This book is intended for teachers. There is a companion book for students so please don’t use this ebook with your students. The ebook for students is available at http://runestoneinteractive.org. We recommend creating your own course with the student ebook so that you can track the progress of your students. We also recommend having your students create usernames and logging in so that if you have several students using the same computer their answers will be saved by their username.
This chapter introduces the approach used in this book and offers some quick “teasers” of things we’ll be doing later. Don’t worry if you don’t understand the code (programs - instructions that a computer can understand) that you see in this chapter. We’ll go through things much more slowly in the next few chapters. This book is intended for teachers who haven’t programmed before.
Please fill out the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/teacherCSP-pre. It will help us with our research. You might want to open that link in another tab to make it easier for you to get back to the ebook.
This electronic book is different because it uses examples plus practice. Most computer science books are about becoming professional software developers (people who write programs for a living). Most computer science courses require you to write lots of code. This book helps teachers learn how to teach programming without making you write lots of code. It will use the programming language Python which is used by companies like Google and Pixar.
Figure 1: A teacher in a computer classroom¶
Rather than have you write lots of code, we will ask you to read a lot of code examples, because that’s what computer science teachers do most often.
We ask you to use what you are learning from the examples in some simple practice exercises. These exercises are meant to be short and easy, to fit into a teacher’s busy life.
As a teacher, you need to know what students most often get wrong, where you can find resources to help you teach, and how to teach different ideas. The book is sprinkled with
Teacher Notes that explain how to be an effective computer science teacher.You don’t have to install anything. You will read, edit, and run programs all from within the pages of this ebook inside the browser.
Click the arrow at the bottom right side of this window to go on to the next section in this chapter. Click on the name of the book at the top left of the page to go to the table of contents.
License¶
Mark Guzdial and Barbara Ericson ericson@cc.gatech.edu January, 2014
All rights reserved.
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