Yes, I'm behind in blogging. That's a shame because we're in an interesting place in this class. We finished up nested loops this week with several image manipulation exercises, following Guzdial and Ericson: copying, copying with cropping, rotating and scaling (up and down). With the first test coming up next week, Chris and I had a conversation about transferability. Having worked with the image examples, how much are students able to transfer their understanding to objects that aren't images? My take right now is that students who follow our advice (comment on their own every example we give them, start the assignments early, come talk with us) will be able to do that, and other students struggle. That's not significantly different from what I see in other classes; students say "I understood when I (or the professor) did it in class," but if they don't do the work outside the class to solidify that understanding, things won't go well. That's not a particularly novel insight, but I do believe that for those students who do the work outside of class and take advantage of the help we want to give them, the multimedia focus will work much better.
