Inverse Live Coding: A practice for learning web development

Not meant to be an attack and possibly I am missing something but if I paid to take a course at a university and the person teaching it was only ever a step ahead of me at any time... I&#x27;d have never taken the course.<p>This style of teaching (I feel) gives the illusion of confidence that the student is on the right track although its barely more than blind leading the blind.<p>Possibly an unpopular opinion but I have been tricked by folks like this in the working world and academia...I feel it is the source of much of my frustration with CS as a profession.

&gt; I finished my first semester teaching at the University of Michigan. I taught EECS 493 User Interface Development all on the Web. It was a tough class for me since I had never before this class used JavaScript, jQuery, or CSS. I learned a lot, but I also had to teach it.<p>&gt; I could not live code in this class. I didn’t know the material well enough. It took me too long to code, and I couldn’t recover from mistakes in front of the class.<p>Does it bother anyone else that the author was teaching something they weren&#x27;t proficient in? Is this normal for colleges?

This is a format that I&#x27;ve thought for some time would work exceptionally well in technical interviews: rather than ask a bunch of questions, have a small set of problems that start from a working piece of code in need of work.<p>This removes some of the subjectivity from a completely open-ended coding assignment, as well as reducing the amount of effort required, because you can do a few small problems rather than a single huge one that typically involves working over a weekend.<p>The only downside is it&#x27;s a lot more effort to set up than either an open assignment or a standard Q&amp;A-based interview. You don&#x27;t want to throw anyone into real production problems for a variety of reasons. The initial setup has to be understandable within a few minutes of code review.

Thanks for all the great comments!<p>It&#x27;s true that I was just a step ahead of the students. However, I was using course materials designed by people who knew the material, I had veteran TA&#x27;s (who could answer the questions), and I do have over 30 years of teaching experience. This was an advantage when teaching this class. I could figure out when the lecture slides weren&#x27;t enough for <i>me</i> to understand, so I added more to them to make them understandable for the <i>students</i>. My expertise is in teaching: Figuring out how to make things learnable by students.<p>In the end, the Web programming part was only a portion of the course -- the rest of it was on design and development process, architecture, and issues like accessibility, all of which I am more familiar with. (For example, because I&#x27;m an old Smalltalk programmer, I can explain where MVC came from and strengths&#x2F;weaknesses better than many.)<p>The course evaluations were very positive. I think the class worked.

I have struggled with the speed at which I can write code live in class. It is hard to do it fast enough to keep students interested. It is also difficult to show even moderately complex programs from start to finish.<p>I have created a tool that allows me to move quickly through my code where students can still see how the solution evolves. I can comment at interesting points in the development of the code and attach hand drawn pics and screenshots. Here are some examples:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourcodestories.com&#x2F;markm208&#x2F;Playlist&#x2F;All" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourcodestories.com&#x2F;markm208&#x2F;Playlist&#x2F;All</a><p>(Click on the &gt;&gt; button to move from comment to comment. These work best on a big screen)<p>I show some of these in class before asking the students to work on a related problem. I require the students to view the rest outside of class.<p>My students really like these. They prefer them to textbooks (no surprise) and videos covering similar material.<p>The tool to create these &#x27;playbacks&#x27; is free and open source (currently a VS Code plugin). I have also created the site to share these with others. I am looking for feedback.

I&#x27;ve been involved in coding education for about 7 years and this is the approach I&#x27;ve always taken. It works!<p>At <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.missionbit.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.missionbit.com&#x2F;</a> I taught a web development class for a while and we&#x27;d start with a pre-built but very simple web application. It was a &quot;social wall&quot; that displayed a list of messages and had a textbox that let people create new messages.<p>It used a real database, was ready to deploy on day 0, but did only that one thing (two endpoints, one database table, etc.).<p>Over the class students would add new features (liking, sorting, user authentication, etc.).<p>It works well if the project(s) connect!

I had exactly one prof who would live code in class, and I learned the by far the most in his classes. Highly recommend this approach to anyone teaching anything code related.

I really think the inverse model of teaching is a great one.<p>The classic model just seems so turned around. Using class time for live teachers to deliver static content seems insane. And then making sure during the time when students have the most questions(at home doing the work) is also the time when they it&#x27;s the hardest to ask teacher&#x27;s questions.

I can only adore live-coders. If somebody watches my screen I get paralyzed.

In college: They give me options for the implementation (theory first, then practice based on that theory).<p>In real world: They give me the goal, let me find the theory.<p>It&#x27;s the finding the right theory for the implementation a goal is the toughest part here for a graduated.

I really enjoyed this method and feel that I benefitted alot from the peer programing aspect - that part was key.