Loading…
14
Vent: I spent 6 hours stuck on a typo and my whole class learned more than I did
Last Tuesday I stayed up until almost midnight trying to figure out why my little quiz game kept crashing, and it turned out I had written a capital I instead of a lowercase one in a single variable name. Six hours, one letter. What got me was that this happened right after I finished a unit on debugging for coding club, where I told the kids to read their own code slowly and check every line. So the next day I put my broken code up on the projector and let them hunt for the mistake instead of showing the fixed version. It took a group of three 8th graders about 4 minutes to spot it, and one of them said the letters looked like twins. Now I keep a note taped to my monitor that just says check your spelling, dummy. Does anyone else find that tiny typos eat way more of your time than actual hard problems like loops or logic?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
charles64017d ago
Six hours on a typo is rough but the lesson you got out of it is worth more than the time you lost, so don't be too hard on yourself. I'd argue the opposite of your last point though. Typos are not some separate category from the "hard" stuff, they're the hard stuff wearing a disguise. A capital I and a lowercase l look the same in half the fonts we use, and that is a design problem, not a you problem. Loops and logic you can learn from a book, but building the habit of slowing down and trusting nothing is the real skill, and it only comes from getting burned. Your 8th graders spotting it in 4 minutes proves the point, fresh eyes have no assumptions. Keep that note on your monitor and next time make the kids debug your code on purpose, you already found the best lesson plan by accident.
8