When I enter a classroom, one of the first things I notice are posters and wall decoration. In math classrooms, you will see instructional posters with formulas or shapes and the order of operations. You may also see inspirational posters about determination or cool math patterns seen in the world. In a language arts classroom you will see posters on verbs and nouns, facts and opinions, and cause and effect. In a foreign language classroom there are posters that labeling the classroom with the equivalent foreign language word. These posters act as visual reminders and clue for students. With a class that requires students to assimilate a ton of new vocabulary as well as remembering programming structure, a few posters may be helpful.
Look for posters on computer science, and they are few and far between. Mainly I find posters on hardware or inspirational posters about careers. These are great. But I want posters on what I'm teaching. I want posters that show examples of lines of code. I want specifically... Java posters.
So, I've taken my classroom back to elementary school. Besides, we are teaching students everything they need to know about programming and many have no prior knowledge. A little like elementary school. Walk into any elementary classroom, and there is not a bare spot on the wall. The walls are covered in clues that help students learn the new material. My classroom is becoming much the same. I purchased large posters that resemble notebook paper and developed a basic class outline for students to follow. I purchased some wide sentence strips that allowed me to write a single line statements such as how to create an instance of an object or to list the primitive data types.
The feedback from my students has been very positive. They don't have to dig through their notes to find the structure of something we just learned, and over time, they stop having to look at the posters, and just know the material. I have inspirational posters in my room as well, but these instructional posters, truly let people know what we do in my room. We aren't just playing games, or making PowerPoint presentations, we are writing programming code.
Look for posters on computer science, and they are few and far between. Mainly I find posters on hardware or inspirational posters about careers. These are great. But I want posters on what I'm teaching. I want posters that show examples of lines of code. I want specifically... Java posters.
So, I've taken my classroom back to elementary school. Besides, we are teaching students everything they need to know about programming and many have no prior knowledge. A little like elementary school. Walk into any elementary classroom, and there is not a bare spot on the wall. The walls are covered in clues that help students learn the new material. My classroom is becoming much the same. I purchased large posters that resemble notebook paper and developed a basic class outline for students to follow. I purchased some wide sentence strips that allowed me to write a single line statements such as how to create an instance of an object or to list the primitive data types.
The feedback from my students has been very positive. They don't have to dig through their notes to find the structure of something we just learned, and over time, they stop having to look at the posters, and just know the material. I have inspirational posters in my room as well, but these instructional posters, truly let people know what we do in my room. We aren't just playing games, or making PowerPoint presentations, we are writing programming code.