Will Crichton

You were at ICER this year when the paper about "students rush to solve a problem and solve the wrong one" went up. Your own work from ~2016 says the same thing. My gosh, what could we do? »

We could have students write examples first (says HtDP…). But oh no! We'll trot out a dozen things from "our students would never do that" to Papertian theories of bricolage — instead of just trying the damn thing from the book with parentheses. »

In my CER class, we discussed @KathiFisler's Rainfall paper ( you should be disappointed if I didn't). It's hard to say what one thing it was that made her succeed when so many had failed. Yes, it's functional and yes, it's parens. But it's also faculty and a dept OK with that.

A comparable q to "Why don't more schools try HTDP?" is "Why don't more CS teachers use peer instruction?" Research results on PI are at least as strong. Part of the answer is that PI isn't a standalone intervention.

To teach CS with Peer Instruction requires teachers who stay well enough informed to find out what PI is, figure out how to do it, and implement it -- embedded within a department that at least accepts (if not encourages) that kind of innovation.

We *should* have more experiments with HTDP and with PI. We should use others' great ideas more. But there's a sociocultural component to trying these things. People & depts stake their identities and brands on doing things in one way. The flexibility to run experiments is rare

That's letting them off too easy. The exchange at ICER last summer (earlier in thread) was a great example of this. The *idea* is independent of book, language, parens, etc. But even researchers are dead stuck in their ways. And then we wonder why CS ed hasn't made much progress.

Enh. You have the smarts, the desire to innovate in education, and years of experience. You can abstract out the idea, and can figure out how to implement it in a new language even without a book. Most of us?