Topic 4 Feedback

[lmock]

No description provided.

[itssumertime]

I think the "valid-date" activity does not need to be there, or at least should be a multiple choice question. I saw way too many students confused about what to do and they spent too much time on it, although it was only meant to show the power of abstraction.

For the "composition of functions", it should have been stated that we should have them use the "max of 3 things" and "sum of three things" blocks because many students had tons of if-else statements and did not reuse their code from the previous exercises, which is technically correct too but it's good to teach them to reuse code.

[jasnowiss]

+1 for Sumer's comments
If the 'valid-date' is kept in the lab, there needs to be more clarification about what the point of it is, and more direction as to which part of the code to abstract. Some of my students tried to abstract more than just the leap year stuff, and it ended up making their code buggy

I also think the 'brick wall' exercise is too long and convoluted. As well, it requires a fair amount of hard-coding, which detracts from the idea of abstraction. The additional exercises at the end of the page stress abstraction, but because they're 'additional', basically none of my students did them.
I'd recommend either shortening the exercise, or spanning it over more than 1 page.