Travis Winger: Rock Crawler and Computer Science Teacher!
We want to share another story of a teacher who is using CodeHS to explore the world of programming for the first time with his students. Travis Winger teaches at Wyoming School for Boys and has a passion for challenging students and helping them learn to persevere and accomplish more then they ever thought they could. When not working with students on programing or helping them master the mathematical arts, Travis enjoys spending time Rock Crawling (not a typical hobby for a math teacher by any means). Check out his original blog post here.
Day 1 — I have a room with 8 young men who are beaming with confidence and pride. THEY have been picked as some of the chosen few to master the art of computer programming. THEY are the smartest and most respected students in the school, there is no possible way this could be hard for them.
And in many ways they are right, I do have a room of 8 young men who have been handpicked as some of the best and brightest students we have to offer. All of them excel in math, all of them are Algebra 2 or higher, some even up through Calculus. This should make it easy for them, right? I mean after all coding is merely a not so distant cousin of math, right?
FAST FORWARD….
Day 25 — My room has gotten a little fuller (an additional group of students have joined us but we will talk about them in a moment). However the smiles, confidence and swagger is gone from all of the original 8. It has been replaced with exasperated stares, furious searches through notes and silent curses and the semi-colon that was forgotten or the extra parenthesis that has caused the program to crash. Then all of a sudden a student leaps to his feet with a yell, knocking his chair over, “YESSSSS!!! I KNEW I COULD GET IT!! Why didn’t I think of that sooner…. I took me 4 days to get that one line of code to work. BUT I GOT IT!!! YESSSS!!!”
It is this transformation, the time between day 1 and day 25 that I want to focus on. Now I am going to focus on the experiences of the original 8 students, but I also want you to know that there are an additional 20 students now working on a similar course around campus. These students vary between students working on their GED to students working in Pre-Algebra, and ALL of my students are experiencing the same joy, pain, frustration, elation and most importantly GROWTH, as the original 8.
So this begs the question, why coding? What are these students, some of whom have their GED’s already, some of whom have completed the toughest math I can offer them with ease, going to gain and benefit from the pain, agony and suffering that seems prevalent on their faces? I think the more important question is, what causes these emotions equally for students of all ability levels?
The answer is, problem solving and perseverance!! Coding is one of the few areas in education where a student has to truly solve a problem. There is no possible way to memorize your way through a programming problem. Every single problem us unique and has a variety of potential solutions. Many students are good at math and science because they can memorize an equation and use it over and over again. Some students are good at history for the same reason, memorizing dates and events comes easy to them. Some students may even be good at englishing because they can BS well and have amazing creativity. However the ultimate leveling of the playing field is programming and coding, there is no memorizing, there is no BS and making stuff up.
Also perseverance, students may work for days and days, hours and hours to attempt to solve a particularly difficult problem. Students who have always had things come easy to them are now faced with a type of learning and a type of problem they are not used too. Students have to learn to persevere and not to give up at the first missing semi-colon or misplaced parenthesis. These are life skills that students desperately need. But through all the struggles, the problem solving and the perseverance, everything comes down to the final question… Does it work?
Steve Jobs was once quoted as saying “Everyone should learn how to code because it teaches you how to think”
This quote is extremely true because coding takes problem solving, a skill sadly many students are lacking. Too many students have memorized and BS’ed their way through school, its time for coding to level the playing field and awaken the long dormant problem abilities that our students so rarely get to exercise. I will leave you with two quotes from some of the original 8.
“The hardest part is the little things that mess up a code, but it teaches patience and is quite interesting”
“Its frustrating, one minute you’re moving right along and the next you’re stuck on a problem for 3 straight days. You want to give up and go read a book or take a nap, but it teaches you to persevere. Word of advice: Embrace the Suck!!”
