TestFirst Teaching

Graphic Design: Coquilles

Today I wanted to talk about a method to learn code, Test-First Teaching, where the teacher basically give out tests to the students to solve.

One of the best ways to code is Test-Driven Development (TDD) where you set up tests for each new feature of the program before implementing them.

This gives a nice flow to the whole logic of the program and really helps you when designing and executing.

This is method that was pioneered by Alex Chaffee for JAVAscript in the early 2000:s and then further refined and implemented in the Rails framework in 2007.

Around the same time there were several people who thought about expanding the whole concept of TDD in programming to the classroom.

The basic idea is that instead of the teacher giving a lecture in front of the class, he/she instead gives the students small tasks to solve either individually or in pairs.

Surprisingly, the learning was much better and the level of engagement of the students was also much higher than with traditional teaching.

The students report that they enjoy the method much more than traditional teaching and when the students work together in small groups they can easily teach each other the difficult stuff.

Since we here at Coquilles also teach part-time, this is definitely a lesson that we will bring to the classroom and implement in our own teaching. 

Read more about TestFirst-Teaching here.

All the best. 

/LJ