Pat Frank

I agree with many of the posters here in saying that CATs are valuable. I think the instructor has to be careful to ensure that the content matches the delivered material, first and foremost. I think CATs can be applied to subjects related to computer programming. One of the interesting implications here is actually in the environment itself. Most programming is taught in an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Visual Studio. Students come to rely upon aids built into these IDEs, which act like spelling checkers but which straighten out mistakes in your code. Having the student focus on… >>>

I think it's interesting to consider how this may be applied to the teaching of computer programming. There's very little that needs to be memorized, and most of the learning process revolves around applying techniques to a problem the student has never seen before. As such, the usual approaches of visual and auditory presentation, while briefly important in presenting the basic techniques, aren't really central to the learning process. It only takes five minutes to give a learner the basic syntax of a loop. But it will take hours of practice for most learners to figure out how to use… >>>