Another episode of my podcast is live, listen here: Episode 6. – Scroll down for the transcript.
Transcript:
Alan: Hello and welcome to How to teach computer science, the podcast. This is episode six. How do we prepare for exams? I’ll be answering that question and many more with the help of today’s special guest.
Adrienne: We used to have a slide in one of my lessons of literally computer science jokes and then the kids had to guess the punchline and then when they knew the punchline, they had to then explain why.So yeah, I very much, I’m on board with your sense of humor.
Alan: And more on that in a moment. My name’s Alan Harrison. And I wrote the books, how to teach computer science and how to learn computer science. Available in online bookstores, more details at the companion website. HTTC s.online. That’s the initials of how to teach computer science, HTTCS. Dot online. We’re talking about revision today. I remember my computer studies O-level course, I got an A back when there was no A*. So that was the equivalent of a nine. But with inflation being what it’s been since then, it would be an 18 today.
You might remember last week I revealed the first program I wrote on a BBC micro went something like 10 PRINT “Mr. Charnley is an idiot” 20, GOTO 10. That probably explains why Mr Charnley didn’t like me. In fact, he told me I’d never amount to anything, but since then I’ve built an app that makes you invisible. If only he could see me now.
Sorry, this episode is late. My Google account got hacked again so I had to give the dog another new name.
How’d you make a motherboard. In my case, I tell her what I do for a living.
Mam: What’s a plodcast anyway?
Alan: Not now Mam.
Mam: Will you be on Radio 4?
Alan: Not now Mam. I’m recording.
Mam: Suit yourself. Tea will be on the table at 5 and in the dog at 5. 30
Alan: so let’s get on with the plodcast. Podcast.
Let’s revisit our fertile question. How do we prepare for exams? I’ve got an excellent guest this week, always amazingly creative. She’s produced a lot of resources she shared free online and is always a big contributor to the Tuesday night Twitter chat, #CASCHAT. Let’s hear what happened when I met @tough_miss AKA Adrienne Tough.
so today on the podcast, I’ve got someone I met on Twitter originally, I think, as Miss Tough. It is Adrienne Tough. How are you this evening, Adrienne?
Adrienne: I’m good, thank you. How are you?
Alan: Good, thanks. So just tell us a little bit about your career you’ve had a colourful year or so, haven’t you?
Adrienne: Yeah, I feel like my whole teaching career has been a bit colourful. I did the Teach First programme to train as a computing teacher, but I am a philosophy graduate, so whether or not I’m classed as a computing specialist, I don’t know, it causes debate. And I have been a Head of Computing for a few years now, and I’m currently working at a school in Kent as their Head of Computing.
Alan: Brilliant, brilliant. Oh, don’t worry, philosophy and computer science are more closely linked than you probably think is something I should get into in a future podcast, I think.
so you’ve got a slide of jokes that you put up in the classroom. Do you remember any now?
Adrienne: Every now and again, yeah, so one of them that the kids always were like roll their eyes at, but it led to a good conversation, was why was, the computer late to work?
Go on,
Alan: why was the, oh sorry, have I got to, have I got to guess the punchline? Go on,
Adrienne: guess it.
Alan: Why was the computer late to work? Ah, something about buses?
Adrienne: Nope. Nothing about buses? This is what we do with the students. Oh no! They so did to get their answers out. And it’s because it has a, because it had a hard drive.
Alan: It had a hard drive.
Adrienne: So then we then go into, oh, I’m proper nerdy in the classroom, right? Okay, so what would make this better? And then you draw out, like, how to solid state drive, and then the kids would then go into the factors of CPU and, Whatever kind of links we can make, but we actually really got into it and then some students would come in the next week and they’d say, can I do the joke today?
And I was like, I made up a joke and they never went as well, but it was nice. It was nice to get them all interested.
Alan: Students making up jokes. That’s what we need. Yeah, I am going to try and get more of those jokes out of you before the recording is out,
so we were talking earlier about, oh, you said you listened to all my podcasts. Thank you for your support. You’re my, one of my 500 or so listeners. That’s great
so the reason I’ve got you on is because I know that you have in the past published a load of resources and stuff to do with revision and you’ve always had some brilliant ideas on CAS Chat on Twitter every week when we’re talking about revision and preparing for exams.
What do you think?
Adrienne: Okay, I have got a few, I don’t think these are going to be very original, but so one of my favourites when we have finished the exam content is looking through past papers. And sometimes I’ll let them use their revision notes. Sometimes we’ll do it blind. I normally set them as homework for a full paper, but in class. It’s more guided, I think some of the exam boards, are very pedantic with their expectations. And I think the more students look at past exam papers, they end up feeling more confident because they can almost start predicting trends.
They’d have a question on secondary storage one year related to a digital camera. And then the following year, it would be on like a smart TV or whatever the scenarios were. But because they’d done it a couple of times and they then saw secondary storage, they knew that keyword was non volatile. They knew they had to relate it to the context.
Alan: Definitely. The first thing to note there is, reading over your notes is all the evidence shows, if you read the stuff from the EEF, that’s the Education Endowment Foundation, for example, it will say active activities are better than passive if you’re revising, as in things that make you think harder, so reading is not great, but you Answering past paper questions is good just doing multiple choice quizzes or anything that makes you think.
But the other things like transforming information from one form to another which could be mind mapping a subject or sketchnoting. I like to do those things. Do you get them to do mind maps, pictures, that type of thing?
Adrienne: No not mind maps and that’s more because of me as a student. I would always get told at school to use my maps, but the way my brain works is as soon as it starts looking messy, I wanna restart and I’d start to do like a color kind of pattern, and then I’d realize that something that I didn’t fit didn’t quite fit into my pattern or my color scheme, and then I became too focused on the wrong kind of things I should be focusing on. And I can see some of my students with all their highlights and gel pens and everything, that’s what they start.
I do try to be creative with Kind of the atmosphere and the resources we have. So one of the ones before, which has been quite successful is something which I called comp emoji. So what I did was I use like emojis on the phone and put them on a PowerPoint slide and they have to guess what the emoji, link to and they really got into that. And then once they could guess it, they then had to define it. Because especially for the I lower attaining students, like who are able to do the threes or fours. The best thing for them, in my opinion, is just getting their definitions as accurate as they can. And these activities they really engaged in. They didn’t really feel like they were revising because they found it quite fun trying to,
Alan: No, I’ll tell you, the emoji thing sounds great I didn’t do emojis, but I did something similar, like defining words to the class I think it was a kind of a daytime gameshow that Richard and Judy did called You Say We Pay where basically it’s like taboo you’ve got to define the word.
Adrienne: Yeah, I think I actually uploaded it to CAS a couple of years ago. Very similar. I think I called it, don’t say it, which was basically a play on like the taboo cards, and they’d have that word at the top, but they would also, for extra challenge, they would have words which they weren’t allowed to say to describe it.
The students found it quite fun and actually what’s very useful in these kind of situations is for me to then listen to the misconceptions, and then that will always feed into the following lesson, their starter, five questions. That is some form of retrieval, so it’s using these revision activities, whatever they are, finding the misconceptions, and then that feeds in to the next lesson starter activity.
Alan: Definitely, and I always use a starter activity, like you say, five questions or Some kind of retrieval practice quiz and I might choose that. I also use a bit of a plug this for Craig and Dave’s smart revise, but it is brilliant and they do that on the computer as soon as they come in. And it self marks if you’ve done the multiple choice questions and then you just sort by least understood so you can sort it. by the ones they got wrong most, and then right there and then I will talk about them and discuss what the right answer was and why, and get some ideas of why that’s the right answer from the class. And so I basically re taught those two or three questions, topics, if you like and I did that at the start of lesson Every lesson really with exam classes and I think that really helped.
Adrienne: Yeah, I think I, I’m sure it’s not unique to the students that I teach, but I had this pattern where if I try to give general feedback, the students won’t think it applies to them. Even though they would have made the exact same mistake of what I’m talking through, they just, for whatever reason, you literally see some students saying, it wasn’t me. And I’m thinking, no, this definitely was you.
But what actually I’ve found has been really good is when you mark work or when you hear those misconceptions, I have put them and I’ve phrased them as Bertie Bots. I don’t know why, but basically I have Bertie Bots and they’re like three little robots and they will say the misconceptions that I’ve heard in a classroom or sometimes it will be like a direct quote from a student’s paper and the students almost like then take pride I said that, that was what I said.
And then they have to read the whatever Bertie Bott says. And sometimes I pretend it’s come from the classroom, but it hasn’t. It’s just come from my own head. They read it and then they have to then explain to the person next to them why it’s a misconception. But because they think it’s actually coming from them, it’s that all of a sudden they want to, Pay a bit more attention to it and I like a good one for us.
Alan: Yeah, I like the idea that they’re proud that their mistake is on the board. That’s lovely that, but you must have a culture of error in the classroom where they’re not frightened of saying, oh, that was a mistake that I made, and I think that’s important, particularly in computer science. ’cause programming is all about making mistakes and fixing bugs, isn’t it?
Adrienne: Yeah, exactly. And I’m quite honest. With the students when I make mistakes. I do the whole like typical, oh yeah, that was intentional. I wanted to make sure you were paying attention. But, it was very obvious that typo was just because I didn’t really read my slide properly. And I think if we’re honest about the mistakes that we make. They’re not going to ever help you students help me.
Alan: That was a deliberate mistake. Do you ever catch yourself saying stuff like that?
That you heard your teachers say when you were at school and go and you think, Oh my God, why am I saying that? That’s just a teacher cliche. Why am I saying it? It’s your own time you’re wasting.
Adrienne: No, I do have that. I had that today when a student said to me, miss, are we doing something fun last lesson? And I said, what do you mean all my lessons are fun?
And I thought, all
Alan: my lessons are fun! That’s my IT teacher, that
Adrienne: is what he said to us. And I thought, I’ve become him now.
Alan: Yeah, I say that one. Yeah. Are we having a fun lesson? What? Don’t we always? Yeah, every lesson’s fun. Oh, there’s a great, there’s a great.
Adrienne: You do become them, like I had a student today in my IT lesson swing on their chair, and I said, don’t swing on that chair, and she said, let me guess, you’ve had a student that’s fallen and hit their head, and there was blood everywhere and you had to call an ambulance. She said, why did every, why does every teacher have the same story? And so I’m going to be honest with you all. When we’re teacher training, we’re told that we have to tell this story to you all. And they were all like, we knew it. And I was like, I’m lying, but I don’t know what I will say to you.
Alan: You can’t give away all our secrets these are, the teacher’s union secrets. You can’t give them away to the students. They might listen to this podcast and now they’ll all know. Oh,
Adrienne: they know. They know that we’re making this stuff up. And I’ve never had a student fall and hit their head and have to call the ambulance, but I’ve told them about that. And I don’t know why. And I think why am I buying into this story?
Alan: So I went to school in the 80s the 1880s, I think. No, I went to school so long ago that they wouldn’t be allowed to do this stuff now, but if I swung on my chair, the teacher would say, in a very convoluted way, he’d say, that chair doesn’t like to be on half its legs. Would you like to be on half your legs? And he’d make you stand on one leg at the front of the classroom for quite a while. Yeah. Teachers, when I was a kid, that they could get away with anything, really but yeah I find myself saying things like it’s your own time you’re wasting and I can stay here all day yeah
Adrienne: another one that everyone seems to be saying at the moment is it’s not my grades, it’s your grades. It’s not my qualification, it’s yours and you hear it and you see the reaction and you think, oh, I’ve definitely said that before. Yeah, I don’t
Alan: care if you fail, why would I care?
Adrienne: Yeah, but secretly we’re all at home working with it because ours we really do care.
Alan: Yeah, we do, yeah. Yeah.. I wrote a couple of books and in how to learn computer science, I put some revision tips. Let’s see if I can remember what I wrote. Avoid procrastination. And one thing I’ve said there is put your phone away when you’re revising because studies have shown that just having it near you causes part of your brain to think about your phone and you can’t concentrate. Do you give them advice on how to revise? Does that sound reasonable?
Adrienne: Yes. So I used to really enjoy psychology and I read somewhere once that for revision, it should be as similar to the setting as what you’re sitting, So I say that to the students don’t sit in your room where you’ve got all the distractions and maybe posters and everything around you. Try to take yourself somewhere where you’re actually going to be sitting at a desk or at a table. It’s going to be quite quiet and then focus. And. The same with chunks, do 20 minutes, give yourself a break, give yourself a reward, like anything to motivate you. But I do give probably the usual spiel, which I’m sure everybody does, about avoiding cramming and making sure we’ve gone through, like one of the activities we had to do as form tutors, because I’m a year long form tutor, was go through their exam timetables.
I think it’s really important to be able to work with them and then get them to create their own revision timetable and it’s quite interesting the amount of students who will say, oh I’ve got English first, so I’m going to spend the first week looking at English and then you’re like, okay, but by that logic, your end exams, you’re giving yourself a day to revise.
But it is they need that guidance with time as well as the actual methods themselves. And then we do, we give them so many, I give them so many methods. So one of the methods that I did with my computer scientist a couple of weeks ago, and I said you can probably apply it to a lot of different subjects, is alphabet revision.
And there’s loads of different ways you can do this, but the way we did it in class was they had to write A to Z on a PowerPoint slide. And they had to write a keyword that started with each letter, and then when I could see what they were writing, I put it on the board, and then we had to define it. And that was brilliant at allowing me to spot the gaps, because they’re a new class, I inherited them.
One of the students wrote errors, for example, for E, so that’s brilliant. What are the two types of errors? They didn’t know that, so I was like, OK, I need to teach that. Embedded system. What’s an embedded system? They said, Oh, it’s the one where you’ve only got one job. It can only ever do one job. Nope.
It’s designed for a specific task, but it was really nice to see them. But again, I think because there’s almost like a competition element to see who can get the most letters, they enjoy it. They seem to enjoy it. They get quite into it, shouting out the keywords. And I said, you can do that.
I’m assuming with quite a lot of different subjects, like there must be a lot of keywords. Yeah. See which keywords you can write and define, check your definition against the spec and then do that. If you’re enjoying it in class, you’ll probably enjoy it at home because you get to challenge yourself.
Alan: Yeah, it’s about getting that motivation going. That’s the big thing, isn’t it? Really because let’s face it, a lot of our subject is quite dry and is quite, I love it, but as Andy Colley said last week in episode four, he said people, humans, remember stuff that is interesting, and he said, I can remember all the words to the neighbor’s theme tune, but weirdly, the first time I learned about the fetch decode execute cycle, it just slid right out of my brain.
Because it just, there wasn’t anything in it for me to remember it. Yeah, motivation, so gamifying. is really what you’re doing there. Sometimes you did say something earlier that you’ve got to be careful that you don’t make them remember the wrong stuff. So they remember the game, but not the keywords. That’s no good, is it?
Adrienne: Yeah, that’s the same, I think, with the acronyms and mnemonics, which we use a lot of. And I do use them. I really do think it’s helpful to trigger off information and it actually gives the students a lot of confidence. However, what I do find is that students will remember the mnemonic. They might even remember what it stands for. But they can’t apply it to the correct question, so that’s something which we’ve spent a lot more time on recently. Utility software, again, I tell the kids remember A to F in the alphabet, so A, B, C, D, E, F. They have to name a utility software because in the specs, the main ones they need to know is the compression, defragmentation encryption and then ABF are just extra ones that they can name if they want to. Brilliant, they’ve got it. I can ask my students, what does ABCDF stand for? They’re about to say it. Then I’m like, what topic is this? And then they forget. And I’m like, oh, that’s frustrating because actually, if you’re then asked to name two utility software, you’ve got six in your head, but you haven’t associated it. So then we end up applying it. to an exam question on utility software to almost try give them like different methods of assessing the same information. Yeah, because like you said, they remember their stuff and they’re nearly there, but they’re not quite, they’re not quite remembering it accurately enough to then apply it.
Alan: Yeah, I’m a little, mnemonics have their place. I’m a little nervous about overusing them, because it’s almost like saying to the pupils that this stuff is too hard to understand, so I’m giving you a little trick to understand. The one that I’ll give you is volatile and non volatile. So they seem like strange words, but what I always do is explain what volatile means and we talk about the word volatile in lots of different contexts because it obviously has a meaning in human behavior. Someone who’s volatile is changeable and will blow up and maybe have an angry outburst very easily. So that’s someone who moves about a lot. So in chemistry, a volatile compound is one that evaporates, so volatile is related to moving and perhaps evaporating and disappearing. So therefore, the volatile storage is the one that moves or evaporates or disappears.
I don’t know if that works. I don’t know if that’s a thing that’s going to work with the high prior attainers rather than the low prior attainers, but, that’s what I try and do is try and explain that there that these words don’t come out of nowhere. They do have a meaning in themselves, but someone did point out that mnemonics are very useful if there’s actually no structure to a list of things, and there’s no reason why a list of things are all related, therefore mnemonics are very useful.
Adrienne: I think it’s sequencing as well. I know one of your podcasts. You discussed with your guest about the importance of sequencing and that’s somewhere where I’ll say my teaching practice has evolved because I would have been guilty of saying, oh, this topic. It’s okay. If you remember this, you remember the key. And then because the students have been told that and then explaining, I’m thinking like, why aren’t you listening to me? Whereas now they learn all the content and then the triggers can come at the end because it’s for me, like students like my students with low confidence, whether it’s low ability, low confidence they like the mnemonics because they feel like they can be successful then in the lesson.
Whereas my students who are a bit more confident, I don’t want them just relying on the mnemonics because great you can name, All of these software, but can you then explain it? Can you then describe it? If I feel like earlier teacher me would have put too much emphasis on these triggers and then as you said, it completely undermines the key facts.
So yeah, it’s just finding the right timing to introduce them, which is where I think the revision side of it is good. Because for revision, if We’ve got a lot of content. Some of it is just fast pace. I’m just checking that they know it. And if they can’t name it, then. Obviously I need to reteach.
Alan: So specific to computer science then, thinking about preparing for the GCSE exams we’ve talked a lot about learning sort of core knowledge, which is very useful for paper one, but then we get to paper two in OCR. It’s the other way around in AQA, of course, the programming paper or the computational thinking and algorithms paper. How on earth do we get them ready for that? What do you do? I don’t know. Get them ready for the
Adrienne: programming
algorithm-a- day, I think it was called. Yeah it’s applying it to different scenarios because it’s more skills based, so it’s not so much of just like learning facts, but what I changed in my teaching practice, which I think is having a benefit, is I used to do the classic, and I say classic just because this is what I was told in teacher training, if you have three lessons a week, you do two lessons of theory and one lesson of programming.
Alan: Yeah, but I used to do something similar, but yeah, go on
Adrienne: and I still roughly try to keep that, but where possible, I will make the programming related to the theory and I had a load of examples that I coined as Algoritheory, I don’t, I’m really weird when it comes to language, but that’s just something which I thought, yeah, that sounds quite good, I’ll keep that.
Alan: I remember you talking about this on Twitter, probably a #CASCHAT thing, and you, and I looked at that and went, that’s brilliant, yeah, so go on and explain Algoritheory.
Adrienne: So basically, it was trying to make an algorithm related to a theoretical concept that they learned. So for example, we did one recently where students were learning data representation. So they learned about file size of an image and then they have to then create a program. So even though technically this was one of our allocated theory lessons, we had a bit of time at the end where they could then make that into a program and then you’re reinforcing their programming skills of taking input, of multiplying the resolution times the color depth. They’re getting both the programming and the theory side in one and that’s something that I say to the students to do as well. If we’re doing a bubble sort in class or binary search, we’re not doing it on colours, we’re not doing it on numbers, we’re going to do it on CPU components or we’re going to do it on different registers. So it’s, yes, we’re actually just learning what the algorithm colours. Let’s quickly remind ourselves of what these keywords are and that’s why I try and encourage them to do at home as well and I probably now in revision give more time allocation to paper two because I’m conscious that at home they’ve got the online IDEs but I’m having a massive issue with repl. it and the kids turning on the AI feature so then you know it’s like you’re cheating yourself but at home when they’re doing It’s, they’re proud that they’ve got this code, but are they then going to be able to do it on paper? I don’t know because they’re using the AI tools to help.
Alan: Yeah, it is.
It’s a big, it’s a big leap actually. So a lot of Pupils who can write code when they’ve got an IDE in front of them like IDLE or Thonny or REPLIT and they can write code and debug it and then they sit in front of the exam paper and they can’t get started and that’s a big problem. So do we need to do a lot of written programming questions away from the computer towards the end, maybe of the course? Would that help?
Adrienne: That’s what I started to do. So I privately tutor as well, and this was some feedback that I gave to my tutee’s parent, because they would every week say, can we, can you do coding? Can you do coding? And I’d watch the student code and they were using, which is great, but they were using the error messages when it says forgot colon, they’d go back and change the colon. They were using the predictive features to then finish their code. And I’m thinking, would you have known how to do that without that prompt? So we instead started sharing a whiteboard. And they had to write it down and then I could then give them verbal prompts, but it gave me a much better understanding of what can this student do without the tools there to help them.
Yeah, definitely good practice, I think, to get them to write or. Like you put some code on the board and you blank out some of the key features and you get them to fill it and that can be done at home as well without the barrier of not having an IDE or of not having a laptop even because not all of our students have laptops at home but they can all take a paper with a printout of code that they need to fill in.
Alan: So that speaks to the scaffolding that some of the students will need. Kids that get completely stuck with a programming question, right, write a program to do this and it could be a bubble sort with nothing to help them. So you could blank out a lot of the code, have a skeleton there, they can fill in the bits that they need to and you can do that for all sorts. You can do it just for basic syntax, The difference between for and while, so you could blank out the for or the while, which one goes in there, talking of for and while, so there was a question last year. Last summer on OCR paper 2 which asked why a condition controlled loop would be needed. Of course the questions about stuff that you can’t run in Python was one of the problems last there was a big question about The way a bubble sort is constructed as well, that threw a lot of last year’s candidates. How do we cover off all of that, the programming content in the paper that goes a little bit beyond what you can do in Python?
Adrienne: You teach it with the exam reference language, which I think they now call it because, and I think for teachers, my best practice has come from reading mark schemes. I know one paper used switch case, and the examiner’s comments have said students didn’t know what this was. I think going through examiner’s comments makes me more aware of things which might be quite easy to skip over in the spec, which really we shouldn’t be doing.
Yeah, really trying to become an expert on that specification, but showing the students different solutions because. There are going to be different solutions, but an example which we always look at is the substring or length, because in Python they will learn there’s len so len and then whatever the variable name is, but in paper two they can write dot length, so it’s a case of Show them both.
Which one’s correct. And most students, if we vote, ‘ cause I like to try use a bit of peer instruction. So I get ’em to vote first, then they discuss, then we revote. But most students with the initial vote will say that the only one that’s correct is len because that’s what works in Python. But they shouldn’t be saying that they should actually appreciate both of them are okay for the context.
Alan: Yeah, I yeah, part of me wishes that the exam boards would all just settle on Python, but then on the other hand, the exams are supposed to be language agnostic and because a lot of teachers will teach JavaScript or something else, weirdos, but But there are teachers out there who’ve been doing this a long time and they’ve been teaching programming before Python was popular, so you can’t insist on Python, but yeah.
Adrienne: I think what. What was being suggested a lot last year on Facebook, hopefully the situation has now improved, was that because it’s only so far Edexcel that have the on screen assessment, some teachers weren’t actually teaching them how to do it in Python. They were just teaching them how to do the, exam reference language and then I think that caused a big debate of are we now just teaching them to pass the exam because ultimately yes the exam grades are important but then what about those students who are going on to a level where they have that massive project that they need to code
it’s getting the balance and I don’t think it’s necessarily an easy challenge for people to do,
Alan: yeah it’s worrying if some teachers are not doing the practical stuff with Python or whatever language, because, first of all, you have to sign a statement that you’ve given the, Students sufficient practical. It used to be 20 hours, but it doesn’t say 20 hours in the spec anymore, but they need to do a lot of practice.
And and I think that’s important. Simon Peyton Jones chair of the NCCE said that programming is our practicals. If you think of science lessons as having practicals, you get the bunsen burners out and stuff. We jump onto the computer and write programs. That’s our practical expression of computer science and without that it’s just a dry subject because the whole point of computer science is, making boxes that do clever things and programming is a huge chunk of that.
Adrienne: Yeah, and I think from, I’ve worked in a lot of schools, as I said earlier, my career has been it’s actually a bit embarrassing how many schools I think I’ve Now watch him, but it’s given me a completely like different experience in each school. And although I know that there’s disadvantages to moving schools a lot, it has actually been really beneficial as well, because you get to see the limitations in some schools. I worked at a school last year and I was only employed to teach say Year 11s. And for whatever reason, the teacher hadn’t been there, so they couldn’t learn Python. And then I don’t think some of them had the software installed on their computer. And how are we this late in the course? And this is the situation we’re in. But then you also have schools where it takes 20 minutes for the computers to turn itself on and boot. And, you’ve got so many other barriers in our subject that we need to be overcoming as well.
Alan: Yeah, and I’ve taught in a school just part time recently helping out where I would have to arrive at the classroom at least 15 minutes before the lesson started to plug all the mice in and everything that had been unplugged and the keys that had been popped off the keyboard just to, get the computers working again after, Who knows how many cover teachers have been in there who weren’t desperately keen on looking after the equipment and it is difficult. I don’t know what we do about that. Again, it comes back to something we’ve said a few times on this podcast, which is SLT really need to support the subject. They need to give us the equipment and the hours and the teachers, but of course, we’re in a teacher recruitment crisis. So that’s going well, isn’t it?
Adrienne: But I think that’s where resources which we haven’t actually mentioned yet, but ClickSchool the virtual textbook, which I cannot believe is free because I absolutely love it. Like they are so good resources like that. And I’m sure there’s loads of others. I know you have to pay for the Craig and Dave one you mentioned, but those resources they can help plug the gaps. If I have to set cover, which I really try to make rare, it is nice knowing that they’ve got these resources, which if the students have been shown how to use them before, then they can still have quite a good quality of learning experience. And at home, they, some of the students who are off sick or who are on a trip, so they miss a lesson, they’ve got these resources available for them to try and do a bit of catching up as well.
I actually think our computing community is so good. Like it has helped me so much. Computing departments. I’m just so small and I’ve been at schools where I’m the only computing teacher and I’ve become so stuck or I can’t work out a solution or I need another resource and literally post on Facebook, on Twitter, and it’s not even 20 minutes and I would have had DMs, I would have had emails being sent, like it’s so lovely to have such strong network where people do help each other.
Alan: Yeah, it is good, and I’ve obviously used CAS since the beginning, computing at school, and you go on that website, there’s a whole resource section where I’ve uploaded stuff in the past, but I’ve, when I first started out, I was downloading everything from CAS, and that’s before stuff like Teach Computing came along You mentioned ClickSchool, which is a chap called Laurence James, who I’ve spoken to many times, and there’s some great stuff on there.
And like you say algorithm a day and stuff like that. So I would do lots and lots of exam style question practice towards the end.
Alan: So we’ll go back to that conversation with Adrienne very shortly. I just want to remind you that you can buy my books and all the other books on JohnCattBookshop.com with a discount exclusively for HTTCS pod listeners. The discount code you need is HTTCSPOD that’s HTTCS P O D. And you can use that at JohnCattBookshop.com that’s JohnCattBookshop.com. And you will get 20% off everything. There’s books by Mary Myatt, Tom Sherrington. Adam Boxer and many more. And my two books, How to teach computer science and How to learn computer science, 20% off with the code HTTCS pod. At JohnCattBookshop.com. So let’s get back to today’s chat.
One thing I do, just coming back to my top tips, I think we should do a few top tips that we haven’t mentioned yet. Have you heard of the BUG technique for assessing an exam question? BUG stands for Box Underline Glance. You box the command word. It’s important that you go through the command words with them, then you underline key terms from the computer science domain, and then you glance at the whole question to make sure you’ve read it all. Command words are important though, aren’t they, in the exam? Do you explicitly teach them, Adrienne?
Adrienne: Yeah the starter activities we will have a different command word which will be in red and then normally, A lot more heavily at the start, we’ll discuss, like I’ve said. Name a component of the CPU. What else could I have said? I could have said identify, I could have said state. And then the next question might say describe. And we’re like what’s the difference between describing and naming? I think it’s so important to focus on command words. Also, to tell the students to focus on the amount of marks available. If you have a six mark question, they’ll say, oh, miss, I’m done. You’ve written two sentences. Like, how many marks realistically do you think you’re going to get from this?
Alan: Yeah, absolutely. So often you’re marking mocks and it’s a two mark question and they’ve written one word. And the other thing that, you know, that I always talk about is not just the number of marks, but I do go over the assessment objectives AO1, 2, 3. Because if it’s more than two marks, you’re probably going to have to go up to an AO2 or an AO3 mark. And what that is I know them off by heart, of course, AO1 is just knowledge and understanding. That’s just your basic facts. AO2 is applying that knowledge. So what does that mean? And then AO3 is creating or evaluating something. If you get up to 3 or 4 marks, it’s going to need some application knowledge AO2. If it’s 4 marks or above, there might be a part of it that’s create or evaluate. And and so I get them ticking off the marks and going have I done any application knowledge here? Or have I just stuck to all I don’t know facts so going through that with them towards the end as well. AO123.
Adrienne: Another tip I have, I actually don’t know if this is going to be a popular opinion, but I tell them to do it. Quite often in paper one, you get like an eight mark question and I know it’s not always on, on ethics, but quite often it is. Yeah. I tell ’em to look at the eight mark question at the beginning of the exam and then go through the paper Nice. And then go back to it at the end. And the reason why is because structure obviously helps. And sometimes, when you then go back and you’re doing your simple one or two marks in the background, your mind is then thinking about that question. But actually what a lot of the time happens is they use knowledge that has been triggered by answering the earlier questions that they can then put in that 8 marker. I don’t know if people have different opinions, but I like recommending that.
Alan: No, I love it. And what you’ve done there is told me something I don’t know. You’ve given me an idea I’ve never heard before and I think it’s brilliant. I really do, because I do believe in this idea that your subconscious mind can be processing something while your conscious mind is busy on something else. I think there is some psychology behind that but that’s a brilliant idea to read the big eight marker and then go back and carry on but like you say, they’re going to, they’re going to be, have some thoughts triggered by all of the other questions that they’re answering. I think that’s great.
Adrienne: It’s been okay.
Alan: Yeah, so last summer’s OCR paper 2 was a struggle for some of them, but, what I would say is, there were a lot of teachers on Facebook saying, we hadn’t taught repeat until and we hadn’t taught, the structure of a bubble sort, and they’re on the spec, so it comes back to making sure you cover the whole spec. And one thing that, You mentioned was, mark schemes, but there’s also examiner’s reports. Do you read the examiner’s reports? Because they’re absolutely vital.
Adrienne: Yeah. And all the comments like on the mark scheme, then quite often I shared them with the students as well. Yeah. They can see, previous mistakes. And I think last year, what I think let the students down is they’d read a question and they would think, oh, it’s so hard and they just skip it. And you should never ever skip any coding question because even if you can just read it and it says output an error message. You can all do that.
You can all do a print statement. Even if you can’t do the subroutine or you can’t do whatever else because yes, my weak programmers are not getting four out of five or four out of six, but they’re getting two or three out of six. If they could do that on every single question, then They should get a grade that they’re quite proud of.
Alan: Yeah, absolutely. So the little trick of just writing input something and print something, usually gets you two marks out of six for a short coding question. And then after that, see what you can get. If it says. that you need to do something many times, then that’s a loop, so chuck a for or a while in there.
Adrienne: Yeah. And it’s the same with flowcharts. For whatever reason, a lot of my students don’t like flowcharts. So we’ll do different flowchart examples and they had their mark recently and they’re doing the Pearson paper and the flowchart that they had was to do with determining if a number is odd or even.
But most of them could do a start at the top, they could do the arrows. Yeah. Pearson gave them the flowchart symbols, which I thought was quite nice in this question. Oh yeah. And then they just had to pick the correct ones. Only I think one student skipped that question. Everybody else gave it a go, even though they couldn’t, they didn’t know how to do it.
And now they know if they have a flowchart and they can’t do it, put your stop, make sure you join with an arrow on some of these exam papers that seems to get you two out of six marks.
Alan: So yeah any more top tips?
Adrienne: No, I think we’ve pretty much covered all like the basic ones that I can think of and then.
Alan: Good stuff.
Adrienne: Yeah, and then I suppose it’s just making sure you’re using whatever activities you’re setting to inform, your teacher practice that we discussed before about the would you rather questions, which have been quite popular in, in lessons that you give students a would you rather, you give them two options, you get them to debate. And that’s the key part there as a teacher is then listening to what they’re saying and then trying to pick up the patterns if. What are your strengths and what are your weaknesses? Because something actually, which this reminds me of, is students like to revise the topics that they’re good at, which is not very helpful for them because they have that confidence, right?
I know a lot of teachers will do like the whole ragging or they’ll get students to rag, but I do find students will then start focusing on topics And I think that’s where they’re actually quite consistently getting good marks in it, because they don’t want to go over the things they don’t know because that’s hard. So things like the would you rather, gives me the insight. So I’m like, okay, actually, a lot of you are struggling with this, would you rather scenario. So I know I actually need to teach now before we do any more of these revision activities.
Alan: Yeah, tell your students to revise. It’s funny that, so yeah, it just, it comes back to Willingham again, why don’t students like school? And it’s because learning is hard, and so they will revise or learn, if you like, the stuff they already know. So yeah, trying to get them to revise the stuff they, Don’t know I know it’s another plug for smart revise, but there’s leaderboards on smart revise that are quite motivating and there’s a heat map so the students and the teacher can see what topics they’re doing well at and what they’re not doing well at. But then, yeah, do get them to do the ones that are red, not the ones that are green.
Adrienne: Yeah, or there’s a, I’m gonna plug here, and this is actually I’ve seen on Twitter recently, or X, or I should say, It’s a bit controversial, the gamification, but Blooket I have not used that as much with my Key Stage 4 just because of time pressure, but I have set some for homework for them, but in Key Stage 3, that is brilliant because Blooket is Like a retrieval quiz, a bit like Kahoot, but it’s got more game modes.
Alan: I’ve used Blooket before. They like doing the oh, what’s the one where they steal gold off each other, gold quest or something.
Adrienne: I don’t like that one as much because there’s a, Bit more of an element of luck there, because they can randomly swap. So the best one that I like as a computer scientist is using the crypto hack, because while they’re entering their PIN, while they’re entering their PIN, I’m like, okay, we’re hacking, I’m giving you permission.
So what type of hackers are we being today? And then, you start drilling in other kind of Bits of knowledge, and they like might roll their eyes, but it’s the case of some students are quite slow at typing in the PIN, so you get them thinking and it relates to, okay hacking, what legislation does that break?
You’re feeding enough information but a key tip, if you are using something like Blickit, is set a target, and I know I think it was, I think it’s Anaconda, but someone mentioned this before give them like a percentage that you want them to get as a class. And if they get this percentage as a class, they can have a house point or two houses, whatever reward it is, because otherwise I was finding there was a few individuals who weren’t actually reading the questions.
They were just clicking whatever because they wanted to get as many through or because they weren’t taking it seriously. Whereas giving them that class motivation of. Regardless of where you are on the leaderboard, if as a class we can get a 70%, then you all get a house point and they start working with each other by doing that rather than trying to sabotage each other. And again, you then get to hear their conversations and you’re getting more data. Again, which is useful.
Alan: Yeah, I had a terrible time with Quizlet Live. I used to use that a lot and some classes that, you’d get put in teams, but in some classes they just didn’t want to work as teams and they’d sabotage their own team rather than get the right answer. It is difficult to know what’s going to be motivating. Ah, children, eh? We’ll never work them out.
Adrienne: No, but my, the behavior at the school that I’m at now has been a bit more challenging compared to I’m used to, and I think that was partly because I joined later on in the year. They are great now. I love working there now. I have to put that out there, and I genuinely do. But to start with, they were more challenging than what I was used to, and Blooket was the game changer. That was their motivation. They can do the last five minutes as a reward. And then once we got to that stage, it was okay, now your reward comes from your house points, which be determined on the leaderboard, or we’ll do class house points. It’s just if anything it’s a tool, it’s how you use it that’s going to decide.
Alan: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I know all the arguments against gamifying or against, rewarding students for working because, that’s saying the learning isn’t worth it in itself. However, you’ve got to do whatever works in the setting you’re in. And if you, like you say you’ve now moved towards different motivations and you’ve now got a class that enjoys being in your classroom and will work for you. So that seems to have worked. It’s tricky. Everyone’s got to do what works for them.
Adrienne: Yeah, agreed
Alan: we’ve been talking for over an hour. I’ve enjoyed that, but I’m sorry I’ve kept you I just wonder if you have your slide of jokes to hand, or you can remember any other ones that you’ve used.
Adrienne: Yeah one of them was the hard drive one. One of them. How do robots eat pizza? You know that one ?
Alan: I don’t know that one, I don’t think. How do robots eat pizza?
Adrienne: One byte at a time.
Alan: One byte at a time. Yeah.
Adrienne: And then obviously. The follow up question is how many bits in a byte? What other measurements can we name? Yeah, if I find my slides I will send some to you and you are free to use them. I might just have to filter out some of the ones that the students contributed because I don’t think all of them are entirely accurate.
Alan: Have you got this one? Why do astronauts use Linux?
Adrienne: Nope, I’ve not heard that one.
Alan: Because you can’t open windows in space.
Adrienne: Oh, no.
Alan: Yeah yeah, good stuff. If you think of any more, pop them over, I’ll put them on the podcast and I’ll credit you. If your students make any up, I can read them out and name check them. Although we’re trying to keep this podcast secret from the students, aren’t we? We don’t want them to find it.
Adrienne: Oh yeah, I won’t be telling the students about the podcast.
Alan: When I started teaching it was all like make your account private because the kids will find you, they will hunt you down, they will not stop until they find your accounts and then they’ll share all of your secrets. But I think, the world’s moved on a bit. I think teachers should be able to have social media accounts as long as they don’t bring the school into disrepute and hence mine is public. So the kids all found mine my Twitter account anyway. So I just made sure that I didn’t put anything embarrassing on there. But occasionally
Adrienne: it’s slightly different to Instagram and TikTok where you’re sharing like more images or like photos of yourselves or videos and I think absolutely we should. I just would not recommend anyone to put themselves in that position unless they’re so careful on what they’re posting. Even, like photos of people in a bikini. You should be able to post photos of you in a bikini but then you do have students commenting on it or students in lessons discussing and I’m thinking you’re adding a lot of kind of a grey area here of to we need to tell students to be respectful and all of this. I don’t know what’s right or wrong, but my advice is probably just to try to protect yourself.
Alan: I can confirm for the listeners that I shall not be sharing myself in a bikini on social media at any point. The other thing I won’t be doing is TikTok. I just can’t get my head around it. I’m just, I’m like scrolling through TikTok and the videos are like three seconds long and I’m like what just happened? I’m probably too old.
Adrienne: But students love TikTok. So I don’t have it, but I find that I end up getting told about it a lot because especially with the in the pandemic where, a lot of teachers are doing the virtual teaching and then before you know it, the virtual teaching like, screenshots are going up, and then
Alan: I appeared in a few TikToks. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn’t pleasant.
Adrienne: But yeah, social media is, it is scary, it is brilliant, but it is scary and it fascinates me how much students manage to trick us. I’ve had students, Pretend to be a teacher before. They created a fake profile under a teacher name because they knew that our school was very big on teacher Twitter and CPD and they followed a load of teachers on Twitter and they found out a lot of information that perhaps the teachers wouldn’t want those students to know, but it just makes you think yet again how careful you have to be when you are posting things online.
Alan: Absolutely. We got off the topic quite successfully there, Adrienne. Yeah, I think some time ago we were talking about preparing for exams but now we’re on teacher Twitter and yeah, teacher TikTok, it scares me to be honest. Anyway, so we got onto social media I should be tweeting the link to this podcast eventually but it’ll be a couple of weeks when I’ve edited it, because we’ve got over an hour’s worth of stuff now.
That was great. I better let you go. It’s nearly half 8. I better go in. Yeah, thank you so much.
Adrienne: Hope it goes well with the editing.
Alan: Yeah, brilliant. All right.
Adrienne: Thanks a lot. Have a good night. Bye.
Alan: So we come to the end of another epic episode. They’re getting longer. I hope that’s okay with you. When I get talking, I just can’t stop. So what was today’s fertile question? It was, how do we prepare for exams? Have we answered it? Let me know in the comments or on the socials.
This has been how to teach computer science, the podcast. I’m Alan Harrison. If you want to give me feedback or get involved, just go to HTTCS dot online or check the show notes. Remember if you like this content, please subscribe to the podcast. Tell your friends, buy my books. Leave a review of my books on Amazon or at the very least buy me a coffee. That last one would be really kind details at HTTCS dot online subscribe now, so you don’t miss a thing.
I have to say your response there, Rachel, was. Absolutely what a deepfake would say, so you know.
Rachel: Well, so
Alan: I don’t think you’re, I don’t think you’re real at all.
Rachel: I always say please and thank you to Siri just in case because I am scared about what might happen in the future and at least if I’m polite to the robots in my life. Then I might have some favour in the future.
Yeah. So that’s Rachel Arthur. From teach first or is it on next week’s episode? Subscribe now tell your friends. Um, that’s all for today. I’ll see you soon. Bye.
How to Teach Computer Science 