Rock CS 2022 | Rocky Mountain Computer Science Conference for P-12 Educators

Learning to program is hard! Why? Many students form incomplete or incorrect mental models about specific programming constructs in their first programming classes, which make subsequent constructs even harder to learn. What if there were a way to help students more easily develop these mental models in introductory programming courses? And more importantly, how might these pedagogies further enable our students to become proficient creators and debuggers of complex programs?

In this presentation, I will discuss a light-weight, yet impactful pedagogical tool called State Tables, which helps students systematically read programs. In addition to introducing how to construct these tables, I will show how these tables can be used in a larger arc of learning to maximize a student’s ability to reason about programs. Finally, I hope to convey the benefit of using State Tables in introductory programming courses by discussing some preliminary data I have gathered from my own classes.