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University of California, San Diego

Learn to Teach Java: Boolean Expressions, If Statements, and Iteration

University of California, San Diego via Coursera

Overview

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Learn to program with Boolean Expressions, If Statement, and For and While Loops in Java, and prepare to teach others using the free, online interactive CS Awesome textbook. In this course for teachers we'll guide you both in learning Java concepts and skills but also in how to effectively teach those to your students.

This course will support you in teaching the Advanced Placement Computer Science A course or a similar introductory university-level programming course. We'll cover the critical Java concepts of selection (if statements) and iteration (loops), as covered in the APCS A Units 3 and 4. Each topic will begin by relating Java to block-based programming languages and then provide video overviews of CS Awesome content along with additional materials to supplement learning for your students.

You'll engage with additional materials to support your teaching including "deep dive" classroom discussion questions, assessment overviews, code tracing and problem solving skills for your students, including preparation for free response coding questions.

Syllabus

  • Welcome!
    • Meet Dr. Simon and fellow learners in this class! Find out what you’ll be doing and learning.
  • Boolean Expressions and If Statements (Unit 3): Learn as a Student
    • Programs would be very boring (and not useful) if they always performed the same instructions every time we ran them. We'll see how boolean expressions can be sued to control selection (if statements) to allow instructions be done based on some condition (e.g, randomness or user input). Using CS Awesome, we'll learn to create boolean expressions including logical AND and OR operators and how to use these to control if statements to allow programs to check conditions to vary behavior.
  • Boolean Expressions and If Statements (Unit 3): Teacher Powerup
    • This week we'll go deeper and engage with some resources to support your teaching. You'll explore some questions to use in classroom analysis discussions (Peer Instruction), learn how these concepts are commonly assessed, prepare to help students who are having trouble with CS Awesome assessments, and begin to scaffold students problem solving skills. Finally, you can check your own Unit 3 Java and Java Teacher mastery on our end of Unit 3 quizzes.
  • Iteration (Unit 4): Learn as a Student
    • Iteration, the power to repeat a set of instructions, is where the full power of computing comes from. Really, without it, we wouldn't have computers. Using CS Awesome, we'll learn to define conditional (while) and counted (for) loops and start to see the kind of more interesting things we can do with loops!
  • Iteration (Unit 4): Teacher Powerup
    • This week we'll go deeper and engage with some resources to support your teaching. You'll explore some questions to use in classroom analysis discussions (Peer Instruction) and learn how these concepts are commonly assessed. This Unit we have a large number of resources not found in CS Awesome to help students understand how they can use the Java concepts we've learned to solve some real-world problems. Finally, you can check your own Unit 4 Java and Java Teacher mastery on our end of Unit 4 quizzes.

Taught by

Beth Simon

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