Day 8. The Participatory Live Coding Framework: A Structured Approach for Programming Educators

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Participatory live coding bring programming to life in our classroom.

It is a technique in which the person teaching writes and explains the code in front of the class while their students follow along, writing and executing the same code as they go.

We can model the programming and debugging process on the fly with concrete examples.

By showing how to code a solution, explaining our thought processes, making mistakes, and showing what to do when things go wrong we demonstrate the processes and methods of an expert, which students can then apply.

What are the two main pedagogical techniques that support participatory live coding

Cognitive apprenticeships

involve learning by observing, doing, and reflecting on authentic tasks within a domain. Students gradually acquire procedural and conceptual knowledge through modeling, coaching, and scaffolding.

Active learning

is a student-centered paradigm in which students should not only passively listen, but also read, write, discuss, engage in solving problems and actively think and reflect throughout this process.

How we apply them with participatory live coding?

Modelling involves an expert, the teacher in our case, showing learners how to carry out a task while externalize their internal processes and activities.

In live coding, the teacher develops a program (from scratch) in front of a class, while highlighting their choices, decisions, mistakes, and debugging strategies. The class follows along. Mistakes should be part of the live coding because allow us to show how to debug, a very useful skills and also shows that programmers don’t get it right frmo the start, often have to review and fix their work and programs are not written from beginning to end.

Coaching happened when learners solve a challenge that is slightly too difficult for them supported through feedback and further modelling from the teacher and class-mates.

Live coding is a great example of a coaching strategy, and is a way of guiding learners through a task they, while can propose different solutions and made predictions that can be tested and get instant feedback.

Finally, students can obtain scaffolding during live coding in how the teacher break down a problem or an error, highlight sub-goals, together with the use of tools to coding and debug. Planed error for the live coding session allow us to scaffold students in solving the most common mistakes that beginners make.

The active learning aspect is directly related to the component of programming together with the teacher, making predictions about the program before it is run, propose different solution to a program and testing them by coding in the moment, discussing, and reflecting on the result obtained with the teacher and classmates.

Participatory Live Coding is an active learning technique that shows a more realistic programming process in your classroom providing good debugging and development practices and the chance for our student of learning by doing in collaboration with their classmate and the teacher guidance.