Prof Paul Curzon’s will be running online versions of his popular workshops for computer science teachers through Teaching London Computing with support from the National Centre for Computing, BCS, Institute of Coding and Queen Mary of London.
The third of his free lockdown lectures will be on Wednesday 3rd June at 4.30pm – all are welcome (the talk is aimed at teachers) and the maximum capacity is 100.
The Importance of Dry Running Programs
Wednesday 3rd June 2020
4.30 – 5.30pm
FREE (tickets available from 2pm on Monday 1st June)
Online (Zoom link to be shared with registrants)
Please register for your free ticket (after 2pm on Monday 1st) and you’ll receive an email on Wednesday with a link to the Zoom channel we’ll be using.
Talk abstract
Dry run techniques where you step through a program listing away from a computer are very powerful pedagogically as a way to teach programming as well as other computational topics (eg Turing Machines, algorithms, etc).
Two main approaches are
- role play the execution of aspects of a program
- draw dry run tables, showing the changing values of tables with a row for each line executed by the program
Role play is good as a way to give initial understanding of new programming concepts. Dry Running short program fragments then reinforces learning and acts as a diagnostic test to help students over barrier concepts.
https://teachinglondoncomputing.org/dryrun/
Attending the meeting with Zoom
Note that we will record Paul’s talk for sharing later on YouTube so please join with
- video / camera OFF (or just stick a plaster over the camera!)
- microphone audio MUTED
- amended screen name if you don’t want your current screen name to appear to participants
The published talk will be edited so that it’s just Paul’s slides and commentary.
There will be an opportunity for questions so please don’t unmute your microphone until then. We’ll also have a Google Doc open for questions (things can get lost in the chat window).
There’s a maximum of 100 participants, if you’re no longer able to attend please let Jo know to allow another to attend.
Please test in advance that you’ll be able to hear the talk. You can test settings and familiarise yourself with the layout by joining a test room (you’ll be the only participant) here https://zoom.us/test – there are more detailed instructions and screenshots (from a Macbook laptop) on our Using Zoom for our Online Lectures page.
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