How do we prepare for exams?

Miss Tough joins me to discuss exam preparation: revision techniques, retrieval practice, making mind maps (or not!) answering exam questions. Playing Taboo! and corny computing jokes. I tell you what happened in the 80s when I swung on my chair and we discuss teacher cliches like "it's your own time you're wasting!"

Transcript on my blog at httcs.online/blog

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Episode Transcript

(00:08):
Hello and welcome to How to teachcomputer science, the podcast.
This is episode six.
How do we prepare for exams?
I'll be answering that questionand many more with the help
of today's special guest.
We used to have a slide in one of mylessons of literally computer science
jokes and then the kids had to guess thepunchline and then when they knew the
punchline, they had to then explain why.

(00:29):
So yeah, I very much, I'm onboard with your sense of humor.
And more on that in a moment.
My name's Alan Harrison.
And I wrote the books, howto teach computer science and
how to learn computer science.
Available in online bookstores, moredetails at the companion website.
HTTC s.online.
That's the initials of how toteach computer science, HTTCS.

(00:50):
Dot online.
We're talking about revision today.
I remember my computer studiesO-level course, I got an A
back when there was no A*.
So that was the equivalent of a nine.
But with inflation being what it's beensince then, it would be an 18 today.
You might remember last week I revealedthe first program I wrote on a BBC

(01:10):
micro went something like 10 PRINT "Mr.
Charnley is an idiot" 20, GOTO 10.
That probably explains whyMr Charnley didn't like me.
In fact, he told me I'd never amountto anything, but since then I've
built an app that makes you invisible.
If only he could see me now.
Sorry, this episode is late.

(01:30):
My Google account got hacked again soI had to give the dog another new name.
How'd you make a motherboard.
In my case, I tell herwhat I do for a living.
What's a plodcast anyway?
Not now Mam.
Will you be on Radio 4?
Not now Mam.
I'm recording.
Suit yourself.
Tea will be on the tableat 5 and in the dog at 5.

(01:52):
30
so let's get on with the plodcast.
Podcast.
Let's revisit our fertile question.
How do we prepare for exams?
I've got an excellent guest thisweek, always amazingly creative.
She's produced a lot of resourcesshe shared free online and is always
a big contributor to the Tuesdaynight Twitter chat, #CASCHAT.
Let's hear what happened when Imet @tough_miss AKA Adrienne Tough.

(02:19):
so today on the podcast, I'vegot someone I met on Twitter
originally, I think, as Miss Tough.
It is Adrienne Tough.
How are you this evening, Adrienne?
I'm good, thank you.
How are you?
Good, thanks.
So just tell us a little bitabout your career you've had a
colourful year or so, haven't you?
Yeah, I feel like my whole teachingcareer has been a bit colourful.

(02:40):
I did the Teach First programme totrain as a computing teacher, but I am
a philosophy graduate, so whether or notI'm classed as a computing specialist,
I don't know, it causes debate.
And I have been a Head of Computingfor a few years now, and I'm
currently working at a school inKent as their Head of Computing.

(03:01):
Brilliant, brilliant.
Oh, don't worry, philosophy and computerscience are more closely linked than
you probably think is something I shouldget into in a future podcast, I think.
so you've got a slide of jokesthat you put up in the classroom.
Do you remember any now?
Every now and again, yeah, so oneof them that the kids always were
like roll their eyes at, but itled to a good conversation, was

(03:24):
why was, the computer late to work?
Go on,
why was the, oh sorry, have I got to,have I got to guess the punchline?
Go on,
guess it.
Why was the computer late to work?
Ah, something about buses?
Nope.
Nothing about buses?
This is what we do with the students.
Oh no!
They so did to get their answers out.

(03:45):
And it's because it has a,because it had a hard drive.
It had a hard drive.
So then we then go into, oh, I'mproper nerdy in the classroom, right?
Okay, so what would make this better?
And then you draw out, like, how to solidstate drive, and then the kids would
then go into the factors of CPU and,Whatever kind of links we can make, but
we actually really got into it and thensome students would come in the next week

(04:07):
and they'd say, can I do the joke today?
And I was like, I made up a joke andthey never went as well, but it was nice.
It was nice to get them all interested.
Students making up jokes.
That's what we need.
Yeah, I am going to try and getmore of those jokes out of you
before the recording is out,
so we were talking earlier about, oh,you said you listened to all my podcasts.
Thank you for your support.

(04:29):
You're my, one of my 500 or so listeners.
That's great
so the reason I've got you on isbecause I know that you have in the past
published a load of resources and stuffto do with revision and you've always
had some brilliant ideas on CAS Chat onTwitter every week when we're talking
about revision and preparing for exams.

(04:49):
What do you think?
Okay, I have got a few, I don't thinkthese are going to be very original,
but so one of my favourites whenwe have finished the exam content
is looking through past papers.
And sometimes I'll let themuse their revision notes.
Sometimes we'll do it blind.
I normally set them as homeworkfor a full paper, but in class.

(05:10):
It's more guided, I think someof the exam boards, are very
pedantic with their expectations.
And I think the more students lookat past exam papers, they end up
feeling more confident because theycan almost start predicting trends.
They'd have a question onsecondary storage one year
related to a digital camera.
And then the following year,it would be on like a smart TV

(05:33):
or whatever the scenarios were.
But because they'd done it a couple oftimes and they then saw secondary storage,
they knew that keyword was non volatile.
They knew they had torelate it to the context.
Definitely.
The first thing to note there is, readingover your notes is all the evidence shows,
if you read the stuff from the EEF, that'sthe Education Endowment Foundation, for
example, it will say active activitiesare better than passive if you're

(05:57):
revising, as in things that make youthink harder, so reading is not great,
but you Answering past paper questionsis good just doing multiple choice
quizzes or anything that makes you think.
But the other things liketransforming information from one
form to another which could be mindmapping a subject or sketchnoting.
I like to do those things.

(06:18):
Do you get them to do mind maps,pictures, that type of thing?
No not mind maps and that'smore because of me as a student.
I would always get told at school to usemy maps, but the way my brain works is as
soon as it starts looking messy, I wannarestart and I'd start to do like a color
kind of pattern, and then I'd realize thatsomething that I didn't fit didn't quite

(06:39):
fit into my pattern or my color scheme,and then I became too focused on the wrong
kind of things I should be focusing on.
And I can see some of my students withall their highlights and gel pens and
everything, that's what they start.
I do try to be creative with Kind of theatmosphere and the resources we have.
So one of the ones before, whichhas been quite successful is
something which I called comp emoji.

(06:59):
So what I did was I use like emojis on thephone and put them on a PowerPoint slide
and they have to guess what the emoji,link to and they really got into that.
And then once they could guessit, they then had to define it.
Because especially for the I lowerattaining students, like who are
able to do the threes or fours.

(07:20):
The best thing for them, in myopinion, is just getting their
definitions as accurate as they can.
And these activitiesthey really engaged in.
They didn't really feel likethey were revising because they
found it quite fun trying to,
No, I'll tell you, the emoji thing soundsgreat I didn't do emojis, but I did
something similar, like defining wordsto the class I think it was a kind of a

(07:41):
daytime gameshow that Richard and Judy didcalled You Say We Pay where basically it's
like taboo you've got to define the word.
Yeah, I think I actually uploadedit to CAS a couple of years ago.
Very similar.
I think I called it, don't say it,which was basically a play on like
the taboo cards, and they'd havethat word at the top, but they would
also, for extra challenge, theywould have words which they weren't

(08:03):
allowed to say to describe it.
The students found it quite fun andactually what's very useful in these
kind of situations is for me to thenlisten to the misconceptions, and then
that will always feed into the followinglesson, their starter, five questions.
That is some form of retrieval, soit's using these revision activities,
whatever they are, finding themisconceptions, and then that feeds in

(08:25):
to the next lesson starter activity.
Definitely, and I always use astarter activity, like you say, five
questions or Some kind of retrievalpractice quiz and I might choose that.
I also use a bit of a plug this forCraig and Dave's smart revise, but
it is brilliant and they do that onthe computer as soon as they come in.
And it self marks if you've donethe multiple choice questions

(08:47):
and then you just sort by leastunderstood so you can sort it.
by the ones they got wrong most, and thenright there and then I will talk about
them and discuss what the right answerwas and why, and get some ideas of why
that's the right answer from the class.
And so I basically re taught thosetwo or three questions, topics, if you
like and I did that at the start oflesson Every lesson really with exam

(09:11):
classes and I think that really helped.
Yeah, I think I, I'm sure it's notunique to the students that I teach,
but I had this pattern where if I tryto give general feedback, the students
won't think it applies to them.
Even though they would have madethe exact same mistake of what I'm
talking through, they just, forwhatever reason, you literally see
some students saying, it wasn't me.

(09:32):
And I'm thinking, no,this definitely was you.
But what actually I've found has beenreally good is when you mark work or when
you hear those misconceptions, I have putthem and I've phrased them as Bertie Bots.
I don't know why, but basically I haveBertie Bots and they're like three
little robots and they will say themisconceptions that I've heard in a

(09:53):
classroom or sometimes it will be likea direct quote from a student's paper
and the students almost like then takepride I said that, that was what I said.
And then they have to readthe whatever Bertie Bott says.
And sometimes I pretend it's comefrom the classroom, but it hasn't.
It's just come from my own head.
They read it and then they haveto then explain to the person next
to them why it's a misconception.
But because they think it'sactually coming from them, it's

(10:15):
that all of a sudden they wantto, Pay a bit more attention to
it and I like a good one for us.
Yeah, I like the idea that they're proudthat their mistake is on the board.
That's lovely that, but you must havea culture of error in the classroom
where they're not frightened ofsaying, oh, that was a mistake that
I made, and I think that's important,particularly in computer science.
'cause programming is all about makingmistakes and fixing bugs, isn't it?

(10:38):
Yeah, exactly.
And I'm quite honest.
With the students when I make mistakes.
I do the whole like typical,oh yeah, that was intentional.
I wanted to make sure youwere paying attention.
But, it was very obvious thattypo was just because I didn't
really read my slide properly.
And I think if we're honestabout the mistakes that we make.
They're not going to everhelp you students help me.

(10:59):
That was a deliberate mistake.
Do you ever catch yourselfsaying stuff like that?
That you heard your teachers say whenyou were at school and go and you
think, Oh my God, why am I saying that?
That's just a teacher cliche.
Why am I saying it?
It's your own time you're wasting.
No, I do have that.
I had that today when a studentsaid to me, miss, are we doing
something fun last lesson?
And I said, what do youmean all my lessons are fun?

(11:20):
And I thought, all
my lessons are fun!
That's my IT teacher, that
is what he said to us.
And I thought, I've become him now.
Yeah, I say that one.
Yeah.
Are we having a fun lesson?
What?
Don't we always?
Yeah, every lesson's fun.
Oh, there's a great, there's a great.
You do become them, like I had a studenttoday in my IT lesson swing on their
chair, and I said, don't swing on thatchair, and she said, let me guess, you've

(11:44):
had a student that's fallen and hit theirhead, and there was blood everywhere
and you had to call an ambulance.
She said, why did every, why doesevery teacher have the same story?
And so I'm going to behonest with you all.
When we're teacher training,we're told that we have to
tell this story to you all.
And they were all like, we knew it.
And I was like, I'm lying, but Idon't know what I will say to you.

(12:04):
You can't give away all our secretsthese are, the teacher's union secrets.
You can't give them away to the students.
They might listen to thispodcast and now they'll all know.
Oh,
they know.
They know that we're making this stuff up.
And I've never had a student fall andhit their head and have to call the
ambulance, but I've told them about that.
And I don't know why.
And I think why am Ibuying into this story?

(12:25):
So I went to school in the80s the 1880s, I think.
No, I went to school so long ago thatthey wouldn't be allowed to do this
stuff now, but if I swung on my chair,the teacher would say, in a very
convoluted way, he'd say, that chairdoesn't like to be on half its legs.
Would you like to be on half your legs?
And he'd make you stand on one leg at thefront of the classroom for quite a while.

(12:45):
Yeah.
Teachers, when I was a kid, that theycould get away with anything, really
but yeah I find myself saying thingslike it's your own time you're wasting
and I can stay here all day yeah
another one that everyone seemsto be saying at the moment is it's
not my grades, it's your grades.
It's not my qualification, it'syours and you hear it and you see

(13:08):
the reaction and you think, oh,I've definitely said that before.
Yeah, I don't
care if you fail, why would I care?
Yeah, but secretly we'reall at home working with it
because ours we really do care.
Yeah, we do, yeah.
Yeah..
I wrote a couple of books and inhow to learn computer science,
I put some revision tips.
Let's see if I can remember what I wrote.
Avoid procrastination.

(13:29):
And one thing I've said there is putyour phone away when you're revising
because studies have shown thatjust having it near you causes part
of your brain to think about yourphone and you can't concentrate.
Do you give them advice on how to revise?
Does that sound reasonable?
Yes.
So I used to really enjoy psychology andI read somewhere once that for revision,

(13:52):
it should be as similar to the settingas what you're sitting, So I say that
to the students don't sit in your roomwhere you've got all the distractions and
maybe posters and everything around you.
Try to take yourself somewherewhere you're actually going to be
sitting at a desk or at a table.
It's going to be quitequiet and then focus.
And.

(14:12):
The same with chunks, do 20 minutes,give yourself a break, give yourself a
reward, like anything to motivate you.
But I do give probably the usual spiel,which I'm sure everybody does, about
avoiding cramming and making surewe've gone through, like one of the
activities we had to do as form tutors,because I'm a year long form tutor,
was go through their exam timetables.

(14:34):
I think it's really important to beable to work with them and then get
them to create their own revisiontimetable and it's quite interesting
the amount of students who will say,oh I've got English first, so I'm
going to spend the first week lookingat English and then you're like, okay,
but by that logic, your end exams,you're giving yourself a day to revise.
But it is they need thatguidance with time as well as

(14:54):
the actual methods themselves.
And then we do, we give them somany, I give them so many methods.
So one of the methods that I didwith my computer scientist a couple
of weeks ago, and I said you canprobably apply it to a lot of different
subjects, is alphabet revision.
And there's loads of differentways you can do this, but the way
we did it in class was they had towrite A to Z on a PowerPoint slide.

(15:15):
And they had to write a keywordthat started with each letter,
and then when I could see whatthey were writing, I put it on the
board, and then we had to define it.
And that was brilliant at allowingme to spot the gaps, because they're
a new class, I inherited them.
One of the students wrote errors, forexample, for E, so that's brilliant.
What are the two types of errors?
They didn't know that, so I waslike, OK, I need to teach that.

(15:35):
Embedded system.
What's an embedded system?
They said, Oh, it's the onewhere you've only got one job.
It can only ever do one job.
Nope.
It's designed for a specific task,but it was really nice to see them.
But again, I think because there's almostlike a competition element to see who
can get the most letters, they enjoy it.
They seem to enjoy it.
They get quite into it,shouting out the keywords.

(15:56):
And I said, you can do that.
I'm assuming with quite a lotof different subjects, like
there must be a lot of keywords.
Yeah.
See which keywords you can writeand define, check your definition
against the spec and then do that.
If you're enjoying it in class,you'll probably enjoy it at home
because you get to challenge yourself.
Yeah, it's about gettingthat motivation going.
That's the big thing, isn't it?
Really because let's face it, a lotof our subject is quite dry and is

(16:20):
quite, I love it, but as Andy Colleysaid last week in episode four, he said
people, humans, remember stuff that isinteresting, and he said, I can remember
all the words to the neighbor's themetune, but weirdly, the first time I
learned about the fetch decode executecycle, it just slid right out of my brain.
Because it just, there wasn'tanything in it for me to remember it.

(16:42):
Yeah, motivation, so gamifying.
is really what you're doing there.
Sometimes you did say something earlierthat you've got to be careful that you
don't make them remember the wrong stuff.
So they remember the game,but not the keywords.
That's no good, is it?
Yeah, that's the same, Ithink, with the acronyms and
mnemonics, which we use a lot of.
And I do use them.

(17:04):
I really do think it's helpful totrigger off information and it actually
gives the students a lot of confidence.
However, what I do find is thatstudents will remember the mnemonic.
They might even rememberwhat it stands for.
But they can't apply it to the correctquestion, so that's something which
we've spent a lot more time on recently.

(17:25):
Utility software, again, I tellthe kids remember A to F in the
alphabet, so A, B, C, D, E, F.
They have to name a utility softwarebecause in the specs, the main ones
they need to know is the compression,defragmentation encryption and
then ABF are just extra ones thatthey can name if they want to.
Brilliant, they've got it.
I can ask my students,what does ABCDF stand for?

(17:47):
They're about to say it.
Then I'm like, what topic is this?
And then they forget.
And I'm like, oh, that's frustratingbecause actually, if you're then
asked to name two utility software,you've got six in your head,
but you haven't associated it.
So then we end up applying it.
to an exam question on utility softwareto almost try give them like different

(18:07):
methods of assessing the same information.
Yeah, because like you said, theyremember their stuff and they're
nearly there, but they're not quite,they're not quite remembering it
accurately enough to then apply it.
Yeah, I'm a little,mnemonics have their place.
I'm a little nervous about overusingthem, because it's almost like saying
to the pupils that this stuff is toohard to understand, so I'm giving

(18:29):
you a little trick to understand.
The one that I'll give youis volatile and non volatile.
So they seem like strange words, butwhat I always do is explain what volatile
means and we talk about the word volatilein lots of different contexts because it
obviously has a meaning in human behavior.
Someone who's volatile is changeableand will blow up and maybe have
an angry outburst very easily.

(18:51):
So that's someone who moves about a lot.
So in chemistry, a volatile compoundis one that evaporates, so volatile
is related to moving and perhapsevaporating and disappearing.
So therefore, the volatilestorage is the one that moves
or evaporates or disappears.
I don't know if that works.
I don't know if that's a thing that'sgoing to work with the high prior

(19:13):
attainers rather than the low priorattainers, but, that's what I try and
do is try and explain that there thatthese words don't come out of nowhere.
They do have a meaning in themselves,but someone did point out that
mnemonics are very useful if there'sactually no structure to a list of
things, and there's no reason whya list of things are all related,

(19:35):
therefore mnemonics are very useful.
I think it's sequencing as well.
I know one of your podcasts.
You discussed with your guest aboutthe importance of sequencing and that's
somewhere where I'll say my teachingpractice has evolved because I would have
been guilty of saying, oh, this topic.
It's okay.
If you remember this,you remember the key.
And then because the studentshave been told that and then
explaining, I'm thinking like,why aren't you listening to me?

(19:57):
Whereas now they learn all the contentand then the triggers can come at the end
because it's for me, like students likemy students with low confidence, whether
it's low ability, low confidence theylike the mnemonics because they feel like
they can be successful then in the lesson.
Whereas my students who are a bitmore confident, I don't want them
just relying on the mnemonics becausegreat you can name, All of these

(20:18):
software, but can you then explain it?
Can you then describe it?
If I feel like earlier teacher mewould have put too much emphasis on
these triggers and then as you said,it completely undermines the key facts.
So yeah, it's just finding the righttiming to introduce them, which is where
I think the revision side of it is good.
Because for revision, ifWe've got a lot of content.

(20:40):
Some of it is just fast pace.
I'm just checking that they know it.
And if they can't name it, then.
Obviously I need to reteach.
So specific to computer science then,thinking about preparing for the
GCSE exams we've talked a lot aboutlearning sort of core knowledge,
which is very useful for paper one,but then we get to paper two in OCR.
It's the other way around inAQA, of course, the programming

(21:03):
paper or the computationalthinking and algorithms paper.
How on earth do we getthem ready for that?
What do you do?
I don't know.
Get them ready for the
programming
algorithm-a- day, I think it was called.
Yeah it's applying it to differentscenarios because it's more skills based,
so it's not so much of just like learningfacts, but what I changed in my teaching

(21:26):
practice, which I think is having abenefit, is I used to do the classic, and
I say classic just because this is what Iwas told in teacher training, if you have
three lessons a week, you do two lessonsof theory and one lesson of programming.
Yeah, but I used to do somethingsimilar, but yeah, go on
and I still roughly try to keep that,but where possible, I will make the

(21:46):
programming related to the theory and Ihad a load of examples that I coined as
Algoritheory, I don't, I'm really weirdwhen it comes to language, but that's
just something which I thought, yeah,that sounds quite good, I'll keep that.
I remember you talking about thison Twitter, probably a #CASCHAT
thing, and you, and I looked at thatand went, that's brilliant, yeah,
so go on and explain Algoritheory.

(22:07):
So basically, it was trying tomake an algorithm related to a
theoretical concept that they learned.
So for example, we did onerecently where students were
learning data representation.
So they learned about filesize of an image and then they
have to then create a program.
So even though technically this was oneof our allocated theory lessons, we had
a bit of time at the end where they couldthen make that into a program and then

(22:30):
you're reinforcing their programmingskills of taking input, of multiplying
the resolution times the color depth.
They're getting both the programmingand the theory side in one and
that's something that I sayto the students to do as well.
If we're doing a bubble sort inclass or binary search, we're not
doing it on colours, we're not doingit on numbers, we're going to do

(22:51):
it on CPU components or we're goingto do it on different registers.
So it's, yes, we're actually justlearning what the algorithm colours.
Let's quickly remind ourselves of whatthese keywords are and that's why I
try and encourage them to do at homeas well and I probably now in revision
give more time allocation to papertwo because I'm conscious that at

(23:11):
home they've got the online IDEs butI'm having a massive issue with repl.
it and the kids turning on the AIfeature so then you know it's like
you're cheating yourself but at homewhen they're doing It's, they're proud
that they've got this code, but are theythen going to be able to do it on paper?
I don't know because they'reusing the AI tools to help.

(23:32):
Yeah, it is.
It's a big, it's a big leap actually.
So a lot of Pupils who can write codewhen they've got an IDE in front of them
like IDLE or Thonny or REPLIT and they canwrite code and debug it and then they sit
in front of the exam paper and they can'tget started and that's a big problem.
So do we need to do a lot ofwritten programming questions

(23:56):
away from the computer towardsthe end, maybe of the course?
Would that help?
That's what I started to do.
So I privately tutor as well, and thiswas some feedback that I gave to my
tutee's parent, because they would everyweek say, can we, can you do coding?
Can you do coding?
And I'd watch the student code andthey were using, which is great, but

(24:16):
they were using the error messageswhen it says forgot colon, they'd
go back and change the colon.
They were using the predictivefeatures to then finish their code.
And I'm thinking, would you have knownhow to do that without that prompt?
So we instead startedsharing a whiteboard.
And they had to write it down andthen I could then give them verbal
prompts, but it gave me a much betterunderstanding of what can this student

(24:38):
do without the tools there to help them.
Yeah, definitely good practice,I think, to get them to write or.
Like you put some code on the board andyou blank out some of the key features
and you get them to fill it and thatcan be done at home as well without the
barrier of not having an IDE or of nothaving a laptop even because not all of

(24:59):
our students have laptops at home butthey can all take a paper with a printout
of code that they need to fill in.
So that speaks to the scaffoldingthat some of the students will need.
Kids that get completely stuck with aprogramming question, right, write a
program to do this and it could be abubble sort with nothing to help them.

(25:19):
So you could blank out a lot of thecode, have a skeleton there, they can
fill in the bits that they need toand you can do that for all sorts.
You can do it just for basic syntax,The difference between for and
while, so you could blank out thefor or the while, which one goes
in there, talking of for and while,so there was a question last year.
Last summer on OCR paper 2which asked why a condition

(25:43):
controlled loop would be needed.
Of course the questions about stuffthat you can't run in Python was one
of the problems last there was a bigquestion about The way a bubble sort
is constructed as well, that threwa lot of last year's candidates.
How do we cover off all of that,the programming content in the
paper that goes a little bitbeyond what you can do in Python?

(26:06):
You teach it with the exam referencelanguage, which I think they now
call it because, and I think forteachers, my best practice has
come from reading mark schemes.
I know one paper used switch case,and the examiner's comments have said
students didn't know what this was.
I think going through examiner's commentsmakes me more aware of things which

(26:30):
might be quite easy to skip over in thespec, which really we shouldn't be doing.
Yeah, really trying to become an experton that specification, but showing the
students different solutions because.
There are going to be different solutions,but an example which we always look at
is the substring or length, because inPython they will learn there's len so

(26:50):
len and then whatever the variable nameis, but in paper two they can write dot
length, so it's a case of Show them both.
Which one's correct.
And most students, if we vote, ' cause Ilike to try use a bit of peer instruction.
So I get 'em to vote first, thenthey discuss, then we revote.
But most students with the initialvote will say that the only one
that's correct is len becausethat's what works in Python.

(27:13):
But they shouldn't be saying thatthey should actually appreciate both
of them are okay for the context.
Yeah, I yeah, part of me wishes thatthe exam boards would all just settle
on Python, but then on the other hand,the exams are supposed to be language
agnostic and because a lot of teacherswill teach JavaScript or something else,

(27:34):
weirdos, but But there are teachersout there who've been doing this a
long time and they've been teachingprogramming before Python was popular,
so you can't insist on Python, but yeah.
I think what.
What was being suggested a lot last yearon Facebook, hopefully the situation has
now improved, was that because it's onlyso far Edexcel that have the on screen

(27:54):
assessment, some teachers weren't actuallyteaching them how to do it in Python.
They were just teaching them how todo the, exam reference language and
then I think that caused a big debateof are we now just teaching them to
pass the exam because ultimately yesthe exam grades are important but then
what about those students who are goingon to a level where they have that

(28:17):
massive project that they need to code
it's getting the balance and Idon't think it's necessarily an
easy challenge for people to do,
yeah it's worrying if some teachersare not doing the practical stuff
with Python or whatever language,because, first of all, you have to
sign a statement that you've giventhe, Students sufficient practical.

(28:38):
It used to be 20 hours, but it doesn'tsay 20 hours in the spec anymore, but
they need to do a lot of practice.
And and I think that's important.
Simon Peyton Jones chair of the NCCEsaid that programming is our practicals.
If you think of science lessonsas having practicals, you get
the bunsen burners out and stuff.
We jump onto the computerand write programs.

(29:00):
That's our practical expression ofcomputer science and without that
it's just a dry subject because thewhole point of computer science is,
making boxes that do clever things andprogramming is a huge chunk of that.
Yeah, and I think from, I've workedin a lot of schools, as I said
earlier, my career has been it'sactually a bit embarrassing how many

(29:20):
schools I think I've Now watch him,but it's given me a completely like
different experience in each school.
And although I know that there'sdisadvantages to moving schools a
lot, it has actually been reallybeneficial as well, because you get to
see the limitations in some schools.
I worked at a school last year and Iwas only employed to teach say Year 11s.

(29:42):
And for whatever reason, theteacher hadn't been there, so
they couldn't learn Python.
And then I don't think some of them hadthe software installed on their computer.
And how are we this late in the course?
And this is the situation we're in.
But then you also have schoolswhere it takes 20 minutes for the
computers to turn itself on and boot.

(30:02):
And, you've got so many otherbarriers in our subject that we
need to be overcoming as well.
Yeah, and I've taught in a school justpart time recently helping out where I
would have to arrive at the classroomat least 15 minutes before the lesson
started to plug all the mice in andeverything that had been unplugged and

(30:24):
the keys that had been popped off thekeyboard just to, get the computers
working again after, Who knows how manycover teachers have been in there who
weren't desperately keen on lookingafter the equipment and it is difficult.
I don't know what we do about that.
Again, it comes back to something we'vesaid a few times on this podcast, which
is SLT really need to support the subject.

(30:45):
They need to give us the equipment andthe hours and the teachers, but of course,
we're in a teacher recruitment crisis.
So that's going well, isn't it?
But I think that's where resourceswhich we haven't actually mentioned
yet, but ClickSchool the virtualtextbook, which I cannot believe is
free because I absolutely love it.
Like they are so good resources like that.

(31:05):
And I'm sure there's loads of others.
I know you have to pay for the Craigand Dave one you mentioned, but those
resources they can help plug the gaps.
If I have to set cover, which I reallytry to make rare, it is nice knowing that
they've got these resources, which if thestudents have been shown how to use them
before, then they can still have quitea good quality of learning experience.

(31:27):
And at home, they, some of the studentswho are off sick or who are on a trip,
so they miss a lesson, they've got theseresources available for them to try
and do a bit of catching up as well.
I actually think our computingcommunity is so good.
Like it has helped me so much.
Computing departments.
I'm just so small and I've been atschools where I'm the only computing

(31:48):
teacher and I've become so stuck orI can't work out a solution or I need
another resource and literally post onFacebook, on Twitter, and it's not even
20 minutes and I would have had DMs,I would have had emails being sent,
like it's so lovely to have such strongnetwork where people do help each other.
Yeah, it is good, and I've obviouslyused CAS since the beginning, computing

(32:11):
at school, and you go on that website,there's a whole resource section where
I've uploaded stuff in the past, butI've, when I first started out, I was
downloading everything from CAS, andthat's before stuff like Teach Computing
came along You mentioned ClickSchool,which is a chap called Laurence James,
who I've spoken to many times, andthere's some great stuff on there.

(32:32):
And like you say algorithma day and stuff like that.
So I would do lots and lots of examstyle question practice towards the end.
So we'll go back to that conversationwith Adrienne very shortly.
I just want to remind you that you canbuy my books and all the other books

(32:54):
on JohnCattBookshop.com with a discountexclusively for HTTCS pod listeners.
The discount code you need isHTTCSPOD that's HTTCS P O D.
And you can use that atJohnCattBookshop.com that's
JohnCattBookshop.com.

(33:16):
And you will get 20% off everything.
There's books by MaryMyatt, Tom Sherrington.
Adam Boxer and many more.
And my two books, How to teach computerscience and How to learn computer
science, 20% off with the code HTTCS pod.
At JohnCattBookshop.com.

(33:36):
So let's get back to today's chat.
One thing I do, just coming back to mytop tips, I think we should do a few
top tips that we haven't mentioned yet.
Have you heard of the BUG techniquefor assessing an exam question?
BUG stands for Box Underline Glance.
You box the command word.

(33:57):
It's important that you go throughthe command words with them, then
you underline key terms from thecomputer science domain, and then
you glance at the whole questionto make sure you've read it all.
Command words are importantthough, aren't they, in the exam?
Do you explicitly teach them, Adrienne?
Yeah the starter activities we willhave a different command word which

(34:17):
will be in red and then normally,A lot more heavily at the start,
we'll discuss, like I've said.
Name a component of the CPU.
What else could I have said?
I could have said identify,I could have said state.
And then the next questionmight say describe.
And we're like what's the differencebetween describing and naming?
I think it's so importantto focus on command words.

(34:39):
Also, to tell the students to focuson the amount of marks available.
If you have a six mark question,they'll say, oh, miss, I'm done.
You've written two sentences.
Like, how many marks realistically doyou think you're going to get from this?
Yeah, absolutely.
So often you're marking mocksand it's a two mark question
and they've written one word.
And the other thing that, you know,that I always talk about is not just

(35:01):
the number of marks, but I do go overthe assessment objectives AO1, 2, 3.
Because if it's more than two marks,you're probably going to have to
go up to an AO2 or an AO3 mark.
And what that is I know them offby heart, of course, AO1 is just
knowledge and understanding.
That's just your basic facts.
AO2 is applying that knowledge.

(35:22):
So what does that mean?
And then AO3 is creatingor evaluating something.
If you get up to 3 or 4 marks, it's goingto need some application knowledge AO2.
If it's 4 marks or above, there might bea part of it that's create or evaluate.
And and so I get them ticking offthe marks and going have I done
any application knowledge here?

(35:43):
Or have I just stuck to all I don'tknow facts so going through that
with them towards the end as well.
AO123.
Another tip I have, I actually don'tknow if this is going to be a popular
opinion, but I tell them to do it.
Quite often in paper one, youget like an eight mark question
and I know it's not always on,on ethics, but quite often it is.

(36:04):
Yeah.
I tell 'em to look at the eight markquestion at the beginning of the exam
and then go through the paper Nice.
And then go back to it at the end.
And the reason why is becausestructure obviously helps.
And sometimes, when you then go backand you're doing your simple one or
two marks in the background, your mindis then thinking about that question.
But actually what a lot of the timehappens is they use knowledge that

(36:25):
has been triggered by answeringthe earlier questions that they
can then put in that 8 marker.
I don't know if people have differentopinions, but I like recommending that.
No, I love it.
And what you've done there istold me something I don't know.
You've given me an idea I've neverheard before and I think it's brilliant.
I really do, because I do believe inthis idea that your subconscious mind

(36:47):
can be processing something while yourconscious mind is busy on something else.
I think there is some psychology behindthat but that's a brilliant idea to read
the big eight marker and then go backand carry on but like you say, they're
going to, they're going to be, havesome thoughts triggered by all of the
other questions that they're answering.
I think that's great.
It's been okay.

(37:07):
Yeah, so last summer's OCR paper 2 wasa struggle for some of them, but, what
I would say is, there were a lot ofteachers on Facebook saying, we hadn't
taught repeat until and we hadn't taught,the structure of a bubble sort, and
they're on the spec, so it comes backto making sure you cover the whole spec.
And one thing that, You mentionedwas, mark schemes, but there's

(37:31):
also examiner's reports.
Do you read the examiner's reports?
Because they're absolutely vital.
Yeah.
And all the comments like on the markscheme, then quite often I shared
them with the students as well.
Yeah.
They can see, previous mistakes.
And I think last year, what I thinklet the students down is they'd read
a question and they would think, oh,it's so hard and they just skip it.

(37:52):
And you should never ever skip any codingquestion because even if you can just read
it and it says output an error message.
You can all do that.
You can all do a print statement.
Even if you can't do the subroutine oryou can't do whatever else because yes,
my weak programmers are not gettingfour out of five or four out of six, but
they're getting two or three out of six.
If they could do that on every singlequestion, then They should get a

(38:15):
grade that they're quite proud of.
Yeah, absolutely.
So the little trick of just writinginput something and print something,
usually gets you two marks out ofsix for a short coding question.
And then after that, see what you can get.
If it says.
that you need to do somethingmany times, then that's a loop, so
chuck a for or a while in there.
Yeah.
And it's the same with flowcharts.

(38:36):
For whatever reason, a lot of mystudents don't like flowcharts.
So we'll do different flowchart examplesand they had their mark recently and
they're doing the Pearson paper and theflowchart that they had was to do with
determining if a number is odd or even.
But most of them could do a start atthe top, they could do the arrows.
Yeah.
Pearson gave them the flowchartsymbols, which I thought was

(38:58):
quite nice in this question.
Oh yeah.
And then they just hadto pick the correct ones.
Only I think one studentskipped that question.
Everybody else gave it a go,even though they couldn't,
they didn't know how to do it.
And now they know if they have aflowchart and they can't do it, put
your stop, make sure you join with anarrow on some of these exam papers that
seems to get you two out of six marks.

(39:18):
So yeah any more top tips?
No, I think we've pretty muchcovered all like the basic ones
that I can think of and then.
Good stuff.
Yeah, and then I suppose it's just makingsure you're using whatever activities
you're setting to inform, your teacherpractice that we discussed before about

(39:38):
the would you rather questions, which havebeen quite popular in, in lessons that you
give students a would you rather, you givethem two options, you get them to debate.
And that's the key part thereas a teacher is then listening
to what they're saying and thentrying to pick up the patterns if.
What are your strengths andwhat are your weaknesses?
Because something actually, which thisreminds me of, is students like to

(39:59):
revise the topics that they're goodat, which is not very helpful for them
because they have that confidence, right?
I know a lot of teachers will dolike the whole ragging or they'll
get students to rag, but I do findstudents will then start focusing
on topics And I think that's wherethey're actually quite consistently
getting good marks in it, becausethey don't want to go over the things

(40:19):
they don't know because that's hard.
So things like the would yourather, gives me the insight.
So I'm like, okay, actually, alot of you are struggling with
this, would you rather scenario.
So I know I actually need toteach now before we do any more
of these revision activities.
Yeah, tell your students to revise.
It's funny that, so yeah, it just,it comes back to Willingham again,

(40:41):
why don't students like school?
And it's because learning is hard,and so they will revise or learn, if
you like, the stuff they already know.
So yeah, trying to get them to revisethe stuff they, Don't know I know it's
another plug for smart revise, butthere's leaderboards on smart revise
that are quite motivating and there's aheat map so the students and the teacher

(41:02):
can see what topics they're doing wellat and what they're not doing well at.
But then, yeah, do get them to do the onesthat are red, not the ones that are green.
Yeah, or there's a, I'm gonna plug here,and this is actually I've seen on Twitter
recently, or X, or I should say, It'sa bit controversial, the gamification,
but Blooket I have not used that asmuch with my Key Stage 4 just because

(41:25):
of time pressure, but I have set somefor homework for them, but in Key Stage
3, that is brilliant because Blooketis Like a retrieval quiz, a bit like
Kahoot, but it's got more game modes.
I've used Blooket before.
They like doing the oh, what's theone where they steal gold off each
other, gold quest or something.
I don't like that one as much becausethere's a, Bit more of an element of luck

(41:49):
there, because they can randomly swap.
So the best one that I like as acomputer scientist is using the crypto
hack, because while they're enteringtheir PIN, while they're entering
their PIN, I'm like, okay, we'rehacking, I'm giving you permission.
So what type of hackersare we being today?
And then, you start drilling in otherkind of Bits of knowledge, and they
like might roll their eyes, but it'sthe case of some students are quite

(42:10):
slow at typing in the PIN, so you getthem thinking and it relates to, okay
hacking, what legislation does that break?
You're feeding enough information buta key tip, if you are using something
like Blickit, is set a target, andI know I think it was, I think it's
Anaconda, but someone mentioned thisbefore give them like a percentage
that you want them to get as a class.
And if they get this percentage asa class, they can have a house point

(42:33):
or two houses, whatever reward it is,because otherwise I was finding there
was a few individuals who weren'tactually reading the questions.
They were just clicking whatever becausethey wanted to get as many through or
because they weren't taking it seriously.
Whereas giving them thatclass motivation of.
Regardless of where you are on theleaderboard, if as a class we can
get a 70%, then you all get a housepoint and they start working with

(42:56):
each other by doing that ratherthan trying to sabotage each other.
And again, you then get tohear their conversations and
you're getting more data.
Again, which is useful.
Yeah, I had a terribletime with Quizlet Live.
I used to use that a lot and some classesthat, you'd get put in teams, but in some
classes they just didn't want to workas teams and they'd sabotage their own

(43:16):
team rather than get the right answer.
It is difficult to knowwhat's going to be motivating.
Ah, children, eh?
We'll never work them out.
No, but my, the behavior at theschool that I'm at now has been a
bit more challenging compared to I'mused to, and I think that was partly
because I joined later on in the year.

(43:38):
They are great now.
I love working there now.
I have to put that outthere, and I genuinely do.
But to start with, they were morechallenging than what I was used to,
and Blooket was the game changer.
That was their motivation.
They can do the lastfive minutes as a reward.
And then once we got to that stage,it was okay, now your reward comes
from your house points, which bedetermined on the leaderboard,

(44:02):
or we'll do class house points.
It's just if anything it's a tool, it'show you use it that's going to decide.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I know all the arguments againstgamifying or against, rewarding students
for working because, that's sayingthe learning isn't worth it in itself.
However, you've got to do whateverworks in the setting you're in.

(44:23):
And if you, like you say you've nowmoved towards different motivations and
you've now got a class that enjoys beingin your classroom and will work for you.
So that seems to have worked.
It's tricky.
Everyone's got to do what works for them.
Yeah, agreed
we've been talking for over an hour.
I've enjoyed that, but I'm sorry I'vekept you I just wonder if you have

(44:44):
your slide of jokes to hand, or you canremember any other ones that you've used.
Yeah one of them was the hard drive one.
One of them.
How do robots eat pizza?
You know that one
? I don't know that one, I don't think.
How do robots eat pizza?
One byte at a time.
One byte at a time.
Yeah.
And then obviously.

(45:05):
The follow up question ishow many bits in a byte?
What other measurements can we name?
Yeah, if I find my slides I will sendsome to you and you are free to use them.
I might just have to filter outsome of the ones that the students
contributed because I don't thinkall of them are entirely accurate.
Have you got this one?
Why do astronauts use Linux?

(45:27):
Nope, I've not heard that one.
Because you can't open windows in space.
Oh, no.
Yeah yeah, good stuff.
If you think of any more, popthem over, I'll put them on the
podcast and I'll credit you.
If your students make any up, I canread them out and name check them.
Although we're trying to keep this podcastsecret from the students, aren't we?
We don't want them to find it.
Oh yeah, I won't be tellingthe students about the podcast.

(45:50):
When I started teaching it was alllike make your account private because
the kids will find you, they willhunt you down, they will not stop
until they find your accounts and thenthey'll share all of your secrets.
But I think, the world's moved on a bit.
I think teachers should be able tohave social media accounts as long
as they don't bring the school intodisrepute and hence mine is public.

(46:13):
So the kids all found minemy Twitter account anyway.
So I just made sure that I didn'tput anything embarrassing on there.
But occasionally
it's slightly different to Instagram andTikTok where you're sharing like more
images or like photos of yourselves orvideos and I think absolutely we should.
I just would not recommend anyone to putthemselves in that position unless they're

(46:38):
so careful on what they're posting.
Even, like photos of people in a bikini.
You should be able to post photos ofyou in a bikini but then you do have
students commenting on it or studentsin lessons discussing and I'm thinking
you're adding a lot of kind of a greyarea here of to we need to tell students
to be respectful and all of this.
I don't know what's right orwrong, but my advice is probably

(47:01):
just to try to protect yourself.
I can confirm for the listeners thatI shall not be sharing myself in a
bikini on social media at any point.
The other thing I won'tbe doing is TikTok.
I just can't get my head around it.
I'm just, I'm like scrollingthrough TikTok and the videos
are like three seconds long andI'm like what just happened?
I'm probably too old.
But students love TikTok.

(47:22):
So I don't have it, but I find thatI end up getting told about it a lot
because especially with the in thepandemic where, a lot of teachers are
doing the virtual teaching and thenbefore you know it, the virtual teaching
like, screenshots are going up, and then
I appeared in a few TikToks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It wasn't pleasant.
But yeah, social media is, it isscary, it is brilliant, but it

(47:46):
is scary and it fascinates me howmuch students manage to trick us.
I've had students, Pretendto be a teacher before.
They created a fake profile under ateacher name because they knew that our
school was very big on teacher Twitterand CPD and they followed a load of
teachers on Twitter and they found outa lot of information that perhaps the

(48:07):
teachers wouldn't want those studentsto know, but it just makes you think
yet again how careful you have to bewhen you are posting things online.
Absolutely.
We got off the topic quitesuccessfully there, Adrienne.
Yeah, I think some time ago we weretalking about preparing for exams but
now we're on teacher Twitter and yeah,teacher TikTok, it scares me to be honest.

(48:28):
Anyway, so we got onto social mediaI should be tweeting the link to
this podcast eventually but it'llbe a couple of weeks when I've
edited it, because we've got overan hour's worth of stuff now.
That was great.
I better let you go.
It's nearly half 8.
I better go in.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Hope it goes well with the editing.

(48:49):
Yeah, brilliant.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Have a good night.
Bye.
So we come to the endof another epic episode.
They're getting longer.
I hope that's okay with you.
When I get talking, I just can't stop.
So what was today's fertile question?

(49:10):
It was, how do we prepare for exams?
Have we answered it?
Let me know in thecomments or on the socials.
This has been how to teachcomputer science, the podcast.
I'm Alan Harrison.
If you want to give me feedback orget involved, just go to HTTCS dot
online or check the show notes.
Remember if you like this content,please subscribe to the podcast.

(49:31):
Tell your friends, buy my books.
Leave a review of my books on Amazonor at the very least buy me a coffee.
That last one would be really kinddetails at HTTCS dot online subscribe
now, so you don't miss a thing.
I have to say your responsethere, Rachel, was.
Absolutely what a deepfakewould say, so you know.

(49:52):
Well, so
I don't think you're, I don'tthink you're real at all.
I always say please and thank youto Siri just in case because I
am scared about what might happenin the future and at least if I'm
polite to the robots in my life.
Then I might have somefavour in the future.
Yeah.
So that's Rachel Arthur.

(50:12):
From teach first or is iton next week's episode?
Subscribe now tell your friends.
Um, that's all for today.
I'll see you soon.
Bye.