Episode 121
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[00:00:00] Sean: All right.

Hello aNd welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 121 and we're back for another quick bite this week. Just a short episode to talk about teaching or coding. My name is Sean Tibor. I'm a coder who teaches.

[00:00:28] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And my name's Kelly Schuster Paredes and I'm a teacher that codes.

[00:00:32] Sean: Yeah. So Kelly, yeah, it's your turn. You're up. Let's, let's do this.

[00:00:37] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh my goodness. I hope everybody's doing okay. I feel like so weird all the time without our winds of the week. So much to share, but 15 minute insights. This is a quirky little teaching tip that, I think we've had, when you were with us, , when you and I were teaching together, but it has mutated to the entire back wall of our computer science room.

this is called the Board of Knowledge, and it's like a little coined term that, it actually is proven with, three learning theories, and I'll talk about that later, but it's a, essential part of coding, especially with, the sixth graders. And it has become, I don't want to say a crutch, but it is like a crutch for me and I feel every nine weeks when I wipe it clean, I'm very saddened, but very excited at the same time.

So that's what my topic is tonight. You ready for this?

[00:01:33] Sean: All right, let's do it. So tell me what this is. What is this board of knowledge, or is it some

[00:01:41] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's what it's called now.

[00:01:43] Sean: tablet, you like etch it in there? Like, how does this thing work?

[00:01:47] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. So we call this the board of knowledge because we have the entire back wall of our classroom is whiteboard. In fact, that was something that you and I and, you know, initiated in our classroom.

Everything was whiteboard space. The entire room is, somewhere to sketch out our thoughts. The back room Is so big that I think kids are scared to write on it because it's so large. So I took it as mine and we have it segmented for sixth, seventh and eighth. At eighth grade, the board of knowledge is very limited.

It's almost like a, an agenda of every single concept that we've learned and three years. But the board of knowledge for the sixth graders is pretty much my little pictures of metaphors, my sketch notes, my organization of all the concepts. For example, I always organize all the data types in one spot. So as we introduce data types, strings, integers, floats, then lists.

We organize them into little chunks of areas. I organize all the methods into one area so that they can see the pattern. So, dot, strip. parentheses or dot pop parentheses, and they see that string methods and list methods and all those good things have the same pattern so that they can see that this is something that's done to an object.

I build my hamburger metaphor with my if and my else and all my tomato and meats and that's all my ellipse in the middle. I build my, strings, my happy birthday string so that the kids can understand that a string is like a single character on a little picture. And I have all these little I don't say mnemonics, but pictures mixed in with, vocabulary words.

So as a sixth grader, there's so many things like instances and objects and variables, data types, that it's a bit overwhelming. And as we introduce each of these topics on code. I also run around to the back of the room and I'm like, stand up, look at the board of knowledge. And we write and we draw the pictures.

And I say, we, I, draw the pictures out for them. They have this there the entire quarter, it has become the board of knowledge for them. I don't even know who coined it as some sixth grader said, it's like the board of knowledge. Yes, that's what it is. . It is something that they often refer to whenever they have a question. 

whenever they take a class challenge, knowledge is not mine to own. It is the classrooms and it has just been a great little teaching tool.

[00:04:28] Sean: Nice. I find it funny, like you mentioned early on, that like the 8th grade board doesn't have as much information on it because they know everything anyways, they don't need to be taught. I love this because, , it's almost like having a community set of notes.

Or community set of knowledge that's available, for everyone. As much as I love things being digital, sometimes there's no substitute for having it. out of the corner of your eye in the classroom where you can look over there for a second and see it and go, Oh yeah, that thing, that word that we were talking about, or what are the data types?

I'm going to look over there and see them. It becomes something that's present in the room as an artifact of the learning, but something that persists throughout the quarter. They're always seeing it grow and change over the course of the nine weeks.

[00:05:15] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. And a hundred percent, for example, we've only been in class for two weeks and it's just a nice reflection, especially for the sixth graders. I say, look how much you've learned in four classes. At the end of the nine weeks, we take a pause, we take a moment before it gets wiped clean, which is always like this funny little cry from them.

We reflect on How much we've learned and how much we have accomplished in the nine weeks. It's quite funny though, because the seventh graders come in and they're like, well, wait, where's the, where's the list methods? We're not there yet. So it hasn't been entered onto the board of knowledge.

A lot of the kids get used to looking back at the sixth grade basic concepts and referring to it. But it's not just about something. It's actually because I love cognitive theories and I love learning theories. Someone asked me if I wanted to do a, Doctorate in education. I said, why already?

I've already written enough, and studied enough on all these theories. So I will go into my theories and I wrote a post about this so you can read a little bit more, but cognitive load theory. We talked a lot about this in the past. This is this idea that our sixth graders come in and we're throwing out words like objects and instances and import libraries and do et cetera, et cetera.

That takes in and acquires a lot of brain power. The cognitive load, the working memory that our students can handle gets used up on these words that they have no knowledge of. By putting the information on the board and giving them some place to look, they don't have to spend that load.

on the actual vocabulary and it allows them to get straight to coding. If they're not freaking out about anything and it just reduces that demands on their working memory. If they say, Oh, I have a syntax error. What does that mean? That means I'm missing a parentheses or quote because it's listed on the back of the board.

Even though the tracebacks are there, something about it written in regular English. And don't get me wrong, the Tracebacks are amazing, and they've done a great job making the Tracebacks even more readable. But still, to a 6th grader, when they see all that gobbly goop on the top, they still freak out a little bit.

[00:07:32] Sean: Makes a lot of sense, and that's not just for learning, and for being in a classroom environment, it's for processing information.

And that cognitive load of recall is something that we don't always take into account when we're trying to perform a task, whether that task is learning something new or trying to write code or solve a problem. It's the equivalent of there's a difference between writing the code that you're very familiar with and the structures that you've practiced, and you know this stuff really well, versus something that's new and you have to stop and go look it up,

in the library or in the API documentation if you're trying to think about what that feels like, and you haven't been in the learner's position for a while, think about it like I'm trying to do something and I don't have the answer already present in my head.

I have to go recall it or find it somewhere. If you're doing that all the time. It's exhausting mentally and you don't have much bandwidth left for the rest of the work or the problem that you're trying to solve.

[00:08:29] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 100%. I always think back to Eric Mathis's cheat sheets when I first was learning. We talked about somehow blowing these things up, but those are overwhelming to our 6th graders, so we only gave them one or a little Snippets of one because those sixth graders, we're 10, 11 years old trying to process all this new vocabulary and trying to use a computer.

It's just, let's just minimize

[00:08:55] Sean: That's where the board of knowledge is helpful because if they're part of the creation process, whether they're writing it on the board or you're writing it on the board, but they see it grow over time, it's much more accessible to them than here's this wall of text that's, printed out or even 10 or 15 sheets of paper, it can be overwhelming versus

coming along with that process , of building it and developing it. I know where to look for the things that were there because I was there when it was written down. Hello.

[00:09:21] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Another thing that it does is this zone of proximal development, more or less , the scaffolding as educators were always told to help scaffold, students that have learning differences. Scaffolding is for anyone. So we know the potential of our sixth graders. We know what they're going to get to in nine weeks.

And we know that they have the ability to get there. We have to help them build the process. So just like scaffolding around a building or construction, you put up this perimeter so you can work at higher levels. We add this scaffolding process of putting the stuff there. So they don't have to try to recall or search up, the functions, or if they are like, Oh, I need to do a dot lower, but I can't remember it's dot lower parentheses.

I can't remember if it's dot lower case. If it's all there in front of them, they can build their new skills and be scaffolded with the simpler ones that they can't quite access.

[00:10:22] Sean: Yeah. Is that when you say proximal learning, are you talking about like spatial proximity? Like if you write it on the board, if you put things closer together, does that have more meeting or are

[00:10:33] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: no.

[00:10:33] Sean: about like the, having the concepts linked in some

[00:10:36] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's in the proximal development. It's the place where they are learning at. It's trying to hit that spot so you know that they're on this trajectory. You know that they can learn at this level. They just haven't developed the concepts or they haven't connected the dots. So you are scaffolding, trying to bridge, that they have the creativity to say, Oh, well, I want it to do if this than that, but they can't remember that structure.

So this is the area where they can learn the best. And so as a teacher, every student's different, but you try to hope for the whole and expect it to be great for everyone. Just cross your fingers and go. . 

The last one is, is interesting and it's not necessarily proven. And, but I want to state that it's not dealing with learning styles.

So , the myth of people having learning styles is completely wrong. We don't learn a certain way , but we do have. different paths in our brains. Like we have a visual path and a verbal path. Some people think if I write the notes on the board and say it at the same time, they're going to learn better.

That's not what that means. When I say something. Versus when I draw it in sketchnote, or when I make metaphors or pictures, there's two different ways that our brain process, and some cognitive scientists will have to explain this better, but we kind of dual code it into our brain so that we have both some sort of visual picture, Barbara Oakley had said this once before, some sort of metaphor to connect what the verbal side has read or taken in. So a lot of the times I'm like, remember the happy birthday string? It has quotes and it's not a number. It's a happy fifth birthday. So those little visual cues. Help them to remember that, Oh, yes, I need to put an int in front of my input, or I need to cast it a different way.

And this whole dual coding is what happens in the back of my board of knowledge, and there's nice little pictures and different colors and everything has a reason and a meaning. It's one of my favorite tools. It's something I look forward to wiping it off and rewriting it. Cause I try to make it different each time.

So board of knowledge. There you go. Teacher

[00:13:01] Sean: you go, there you go, I might have to use that, and by the way, we were lucky enough to have the ability to paint the wall of our classroom and make it a whiteboard wall. This doesn't have to be on a whiteboard. It could be on a sheet of butcher paper. It could be on, those tear off flip charts where you can tear them off and stick them to the wall and, build it out that way.

So there's a lot of ways to be creative here, in terms of how you. Collect this knowledge and represent it on the wall or in some area of your classroom. I'm actually doing some corporate training in about a week and a half, and this is something that we'll probably end up using in the training room, with a whiteboard easel or something like that, that we can just track all of these things in one place. I like the idea of Having people be invested in the board of knowledge that we create together. So if you see something that you want to remember that you think we'll need later, go write it on the board of knowledge, make it part of it. , add it to here and not just writing the text.

It's make it connect, make it visual, make it something that people can recognize.

[00:14:00] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, and a hundred percent, if people want to research more, I used to really get into sketchnoting and you'll notice that, at events or conferences, they always have some sort of sketchnote. Noter who puts in stuff, , to help participants remember what happened at a workshop with pictures and drawings and connections and arrows.

So yeah, 100%. Yay, see? Sixteen minutes! Oh my goodness!

[00:14:25] Sean: You're doing really well. All right, any other final thoughts or updates for everyone?

[00:14:30] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Um, nope, just a reminder about the Python Tutor website. You want a reminder about that?

[00:14:36] Sean: Yeah, so in, in the spirit of sharing links and sharing information, we are sharing the Python Tutor website with all of you as a great learning resource. We are getting a little mention on their site as a great resource for teachers. There's no money changing hands, it's just... Back in the true spirit of the early web, we have something great.

We love to use it. We're sharing it with you so that more people can find it and use it and enjoy it. It works really well for teaching, for tutoring. I have actually been tutoring over the last week using it for JavaScript, which has been great because it's not my strongest language, but I can focus on the teaching aspects of how to make it work, not on the mechanics of how do I get JavaScript code to run, in this environment.

It's been good for that purpose because it's really helped us slow down and talk through each step of a program's execution, why things happen, when they happen, and visualize it in a way That is easy to understand and to make sense. And as we start to move into data structures arrays or maps, this is going to be really helpful for that, , teaching as well, because I find that's where having the visuals from Python Tutor really helps, as well as the ability to step backwards if you miss something.

[00:15:49] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 100 percent I love it. Another visual as well, it's got the little, boxes for lists. I say this all the time, but looping through lists and nested lists or nested if statements or loops, what am I trying to say? Nested loops. Sorry. I really hard for sixth graders to understand. And it's hard for me sometimes to recall when I was.

learning. So a

[00:16:11] Sean: The good news , is doing it as usually easier than explaining it.

[00:16:13] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Hundred percent.

[00:16:17] Sean: all right. Well, I, I think that does it for our quick bite. So for teaching Python, this is Sean.

[00:16:22] Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And this is Kelly signing off.