What should students be doing in a Java programming class? What should they be doing to get ready for an autonomous robotics competition? If you said programming or writing code you would be correct. There is always the need for some small amount of lecture, but I found myself at the end of class on Friday realizing that I had spent too much time talking and the students spent too much time working on the board rather than writing and running code.
Preparation is the key to having a good classroom experience and that preparation falls into two categories, environment preparation and lesson preparation. Environment preparation is typically a one time investment with recurring dividends. It involves ensuring that the computers, applications and repositories are available and ready to go. Lesson preparation needs to be done for each lesson and adjusted in real time.
At the school the students are using Apple computers for writing their code. Unfortunately we occasionally run into problems logging into these machines. This can eat valuable class time waiting for the system to become available. In addition to the machines, they need to be configured with the correct version of software for Java development. In our case that is Eclipse with the Android Development Tools correctly configured for our target platform. In addition the students need to have access to the correct repositories of code so they can quickly get to work. I will need to make some time outside of scheduled class times to attempt to resolve these issues so that class time can be more productive
With four students in the mix it's hard for them all to be working on the same tasks. My future lesson plans will be developed so that the students are broken into two pairs. One pair will focus on hardware specific programming and the other will work on simulator based programming. Teams will be changed frequently and everyone will have the opportunity to work in both domains, hopefully moving previous projects from the simulator to the robot and vice versa. In order to accomplish this goal I will need to have more specific tasks outlined for them. I will be attempting to develop these tasks much like the recipes that are used in the curriculum and posting them with repository links as they get created.
Finally, the only real way to improve is to review performance. I will be doing a better job of coming up with a lesson plan and making myself accountable for sticking to the schedule. This will help me identify what elements are working and what elements need more attention.
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