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Balancing Teaching CS Efficiently with Motivating Students

Communications of the ACM

A computing educator has to balance teaching efficiently and motivating the student. Efficient teaching means teaching abstractly, emphasizing practice, and preferring direct instruction over having students "figure it out." Motivating the student means giving the students authentic situations, real-world complexity, and reasons to practice. I recently wrote an essay describing this tension (http://bit.ly/2nFRuGZ). Herbert Simon (one of the three authors of the Science article first answering the question "What is Computer Science?"; http://bit.ly/2nFIzpf)