Solving Practice Problems
Overview
Students complete a practice problem on the discussion board (for example, writing a short piece of computer code or completing a math problem).
Why Use This?
This strategy gives students the opportunity to practice solving problems and get immediate feedback by looking at how others have approached and solved the same problem. This is a helpful strategy to use when students are learning a new process as they can check their own understanding without being penalized on a high-stakes assignment such as an exam or project.
Example of a practice problem discussion prompt
Purpose
Do-It-Yourself (DIY) activities give you a chance to practice the skills that you are learning in this lesson. You can also get quick feedback once you post your code and check it against the work of your classmates. Doing so will offer you the opportunity to collaborate with your classmates and help each other to better understand the material and enhance your skills. This will also help you prepare for the exam and the assignment.
In this activity, you are practicing the skills demonstrated in Lecture 1.1.
Instructions
Write a short program to read the number of hours worked and rate of pay from the use and produce the total salary. You can use the following equation to compute salary:
(Salary = rateOfPay*hoursWorked)
Do the activity and post your code to this discussion board.
Note
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- YOu can copy your code from Eclipse or post an image of your code.
- Once you post, you can view the work of your peers.
- Feel free to post questions, respond to other students’ questions, and comment on solutions other students have posted.
- This activity is not graded, but you must post your solution to unlock the exam.
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How Does It Work?
The instructor selects a problem that students would benefit from solving as practice for a higher-stakes assessment and posts it to the discussion board. Once a student posts their solution to the problem, they can see their classmates’ posts. This ensures that everyone solves the problem on their own first. By seeing their classmates’ solutions, students can see how others approached the problem and assess their own approach.
Keep In Mind
- Skip grading since the problems are for practice, but require students to complete them before they move on to the graded assessment. In this example, the module prerequisites and requirements functions in Canvas were used to create a condition that students must practice before moving on to other module content. If the practice problem is a prerequisite for a higher-stakes assessment, it doesn’t need to be graded since students will have to complete it in order to get access to the higher stakes assessment.
- Some students may post something meaningless just to move on, but this is uncommon. Most students do the practice activities.
- Consider releasing answer keys (if applicable) after the activity is over.