GROK LEARNING Failing Hello, name & exception woes. Tim SyPy

Transcription

1 GROK LEARNING Failing Hello, name & exception woes Tim SyPy

2 1 DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES A new part of the National Curriculum.

3 Digital Technologies curriculum endorsed by ministers on September 18, Implementation starts in 2016! except in NSW

4 IMPLEMENTATION Lots of scared teachers, especially in primary school No real plan currently for teacher retraining :/ Queensland is the first state to implement the Digital Technologies curriculum Announcement last Thursday from the Education Minister

5 KEY CONCEPTS IN THE CURRICULUM abstraction data: collection, representation, interpretation specification, algorithms, implementation digital systems interaction impact

6 IMPLEMENTATION Concepts Programming Test and debug 2 4 Branching (decisions) and user input Visual programming 6 Iteration (repetition) Visual programming 8 User interfaces and functions General purpose text programming In algorithms content descriptor 10 Modularity, algorithms and data structures Object-oriented programming In algorithms content descriptor

7 Writing a curriculum involves packing everything up

8 Teaching a curriculum involves unpacking everything

9 2 GROK LEARNING Who are we, and what do we do?

10 WHO ARE WE? We're a team of educators and software engineers who want to make coding fun for everyone We are passionate about teaching the next generation the skills they need to become the creators of tomorrow. Through teaching the next generation, and teaching the teachers of the next generation!

11 WHO ARE WE? Associate Professor James Curran CEO Co-author of the Digital Technologies curriculum Keynote speaker at PyConAU, 2014 Associate Professor Tara Murphy COO Dr. Tim Dawborn CTO Dr. Nicky Ringland Chief Evangelist Speaker at SydStart, 2015 Katie Bell Software Engineer Giving two Grok talks at PyCon, 2016 Vivian Li Software Engineer

12 WHAT DO WE DO? Teach programming, specifically targeted at high schools and primary schools Provide ways to facilitate teachers in the classroom in the delivery of their own material Our resources are aligned to national curricula: Australia UK

13 WHAT DO WE TEACH? Currently: Python 3, HTML 5, CSS 3, SQL (PostgreSQL), Logo (Python Turtle), PIL Text and visual programming (Blockly) Coming soon: MicroBit/Raspberry Pi Unix tools Possibly Java (used in both AP Computer Science and the IB)

14 WHO USES GROK? Many schools around the world Notable Australian schools: Christ Church Grammar, Knox, MLC, PLC, Queenwood, Abbotsleigh, Kamala, Sydney Boys, Gungahlin College, Tara, St Pius X, James Ruse, and many, many more. A number of universities use us as a PaaS for delivering their own content e.g. University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, Australian Catholic University, etc. Individual learners

15 3 HELLO, WORLD! How does one use Grok?

16 LIVE DEMO

17 4 HELLO, NAME Analysing attempts at Hello, name

18 WHAT DATA ARE WE LOOKING AT? All code from users who ran, and optionally marked, their submissions for Hello, name, in the last couple of months # users 5,324 # runs 45,329 # submissions 13,086

19 AST NORMALISATION Some rough AST normalisation was performed to calculate the following statistics String constant folding Variable renaming If the first call to input was assigned to variable, that variable gets to be v0 Rename all variables vn if it's the Nth variable encountered Except in the case of a SyntaxError...

20 LEARNING PATHS Six main program structures account for ~70% of all code submitted or ran for this problem Edge weight indicates more frequently taken

21 A BIG CONCEPTUAL JUMP Reading user input Storing the result in a variable Using a variable String concatenation or multi-arg print

22 AS A RESULT, IT'S A HARD QUESTION There are a lot of exceptions thrown in the runs # users 5,324 # runs 45,329 # submissions 13,086 # runs with exceptions 16,288 36%

23 CATEGORISING THE EXCEPTIONS (I) What's the distribution of these exception types? SyntaxError 10,988 68% NameError 3,096 19% TypeError 1,804 11% Others 400 2% That's a lot of SyntaxError's!

24 PYTHON GRIPE: EXCEPTION DETAILS Python is a great teaching language Especially Python 3!! Biggest gripe: standard library and/or parser exception messages are not at all obvious, or even helpful, to beginner programmers

25 CATEGORISING THE EXCEPTIONS (II) SyntaxError: invalid syntax 9,018 55% NameError: name 'v1' is not defined 2,143 13% SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal 1,359 8% TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not callable 1,000 6% NameError: name 'v0' is not defined 753 5% SyntaxError: unexpected EOF while parsing 534 3% TypeError: 'str' object is not callable 488 3%

26 SyntaxError: invalid syntax v0 = input(/'what is your name\??'/i) print(/'hello,??'/i v0) v0 = input(/'what is your name\??'/i) print(/'hello,??'/i) print(v0) What is your name? Grok Hello, Grok

27 NameError: name 'v1' is not defined v0 = input(/'what is your name\??'/i) print(v1, v0) v0 = input(/'what is your name\??'/i) print(v1) v0 = input(/'what is your name\??'/i) print(/'hello,??'/i, v1)

28 SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal v0 = input(/'what is your name\??'/i) print("hello, v0)

29 TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not callable v0 = input(/'what is your name\??'/i) print(/'hello,??'/i)(v0)

30 NameError: name 'v0' is not defined input(/'what is your name\??'/i) print(v0)

31 5 BEGINNERS & EXCEPTIONS A bombardment of unhelpful error messages

32 AN EXAMPLE STRUGGLE

33 AN EXAMPLE STRUGGLE

34 AN EXAMPLE STRUGGLE

35 AN EXAMPLE STRUGGLE

36 AN EXAMPLE STRUGGLE

37 AN EXAMPLE STRUGGLE

38 AN EXAMPLE STRUGGLE

39 AN EXAMPLE STRUGGLE

40 AN EXAMPLE STRUGGLE

41 AN EXAMPLE STRUGGLE And this goes on... Exceptions could be a lot friendlier for beginners Carrie Anne's EuroPython keynote in 2015 has lots of points on what Python can improve for Beginners

42 ANY QUESTIONS? Find me at: