Welcome to the learn to teach Java specialization. Although we will be covering Java content concepts and problem-solving skills in this course, I want you to know it is explicitly designed for teachers of introductory programming Java courses, whether that's in high school or at the university. In this course will be using as it's structure the new advanced placement computer science A organization that became effective in fall 2019. Whether you're teaching a high school course or a university equivalent, this represents the most I would say, commonly used content and materials in an introductory university Java Course. Hi. My name is Dr. Beth Simon. I'm a teaching professor in Education Studies Department at the University of California at San Diego, where I love creating courses for teachers who want to learn to teach computer science in our K12 system. That said, for 10 15 years before then, I spent most of my time teaching introductory programming for computer science majors and university students at the University of California at San Diego. I was particularly known for my research and course design efforts to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our introductory programming courses, and to include more students in those courses. In this specialization, we will be using CSAwesome, a newly available as of August 2019, online interactive free textbook. I have to tell you, they picked a great name because it truly is awesome. I've talked to brand new teachers in teaching, AP, CSA, and teachers with years and years of experience in teaching Java in high school, and they all are using it and many of them call it awesome. The only thing that's great about this textbook is it's not a textbook, it's an online interactive tool, learning tool. So students might read a little bit of text about say, for loops and then immediately have a coding exercise where they're guided in exploring that concept and testing it out for themselves. There's also questions call mixed up code questions. In the research we call these Parsons problems. These have recently been shown to increase students learning effectiveness and efficiency, and learning to program by giving them the opportunity to do lots and lots of examples in a much more quick manner because they don't have to type everything out. We will be using CSAwesome, but we're just using it as the core of this Course. If that's all we were doing, you could just go off and work through the materials yourself. But again, this is a class for teachers. We like CSAwesome because it's a tool you may choose to turn around and use directly with your students. But we're also going to guide you in going through CSAwesome, not as a new student, but as a person who's intending to teach this material. So we may guide you in engaging with the content in a different way because as a teacher, your job is different than somebody who's going to go out and maybe use Java to solve problems for software engineering or whatever. The other thing that we're going to have a lot of is a lot of additional materials to support you in your teaching of Java. Whether that's pedagogies, resources, or tools, we'll tell you about a lot of things that we hope will be helpful for you. For example, for every unit, we're going to start with a block to text overview. If you've taught block-based programming languages or have experienced some block-based programming languages, we want to leverage your knowledge of that to help you bridge into Java. For every page in the CSAwesome books 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, you're going to have access to a 10 to 15 minute video that's honestly the down and dirty. If you were to sit down the night before you're going into class, what do I need to know about what my students are going to experience tomorrow? Advice from me on what's coming up. I will give you my personal opinions about the content from the things that I don't like. These are really good. Be sure to have your students do it. There might be some parts of the text or some of the activities that I'll give you a meh on, which means maybe depending on your student body or maybe if you're trying to catch up, that might be something that you could possibly skip. Even some things that I'll just say from my point of view as a longtime introductory programming teacher, I just don't think these maybe should be covered at this point or now, or maybe they're not as important for everyone, and you can skip. The other thing I'll give you a lot of is teacher tips about particular aspects of the page, examples that you can give, explanations, warnings when students are going to have trouble with a particular thing. Also I'm going to give you a helping hand. A lot of time some extra materials that you can use, some examples, that sort of thing to actually help expand the CSAwesome offerings in ways that might help students who are struggling. Finally, after going through CSAwesome as a learner for each unit, we have a teacher power-ups section. In teacher power-up, I'm going to be giving you access to a lot of my materials and knowledge that I've gained from years and years of teaching introductory programming. One of the things that teachers like the most are my classroom discussion questions or peer instruction questions. These may look like multiple-choice assessment questions, they are not. They are ways to engage students in discussion in your classroom such that they have to go deep into concepts. So they have to confront things that they tend to be confused about. I'll also have resources and videos for you on techniques and ways to teach students to do code tracing, which is a way of executing code on paper. It's really important both for university exams and for the AP CSA exam, for students to be able to trace code to show their understanding and knowledge of Java constructs and concepts and how they behave. We'll also overview the types of assessments that tend to be asked for a particular concepts and give you some guidance in preparing students to be approached, to see these questions and identify them, maybe be able to know what they're asking for a little more easily. Then finally, I provide a lot of resources, especially after we get into the first couple of third and fourth units about developing students problem-solving skills. A lot of CSAwesome is really focused in a really great way on getting students engaged in little problems that test their knowledge of the concept. But then students need to have extra support in taking their knowledge of those concepts and being able to apply them into open-ended problem-solving situations. So just to be clear and to finalize this up, my goal for you in this class is to learn Java as a teacher. You don't have an infinite amount of time. You have very little time probably. So we're going to engage you with the materials and the fact that you're choosing to be in this class to allow you to create materials that you can turn around and use directly in your classrooms. I want you to learn in the same ways that you would be able to go out and teach your students. Really importantly to be able to experience curriculum and materials that you can use with students.
