Visual Examples

In high school I had a computer science teacher who was all about Drawing pictures. So much in fact that I have to draw myself a picture for every computer program I write. I didn't realize how important of a tool that was, and how much of a blessing it is until I began TAing for the CS142 and CS235 class. Students in these classes do not know how to draw a visual representation of their programs, and because of that they find themselves stuck frequently, questioning why their code won't work, but unable to figure it out. When they ask me for help I look @ their code and draw a picture of what is happening, and right as I begin to approach their issue they stop me and tell me they found the problem. Why? Because my drawing helped their brain to acknowledge the problem before I even got there.

I brought that up while finishing up the "Classroom Instruction that Works" book I came across the chapters that talk about note taking and non-linguistic representations. Drawing a picture for understanding is the best non-linguistic representation one can make. Drawing pictures plants an image in our minds that we can reference. In programing lots of things are happening in quick succession. Code is jumping from function to function, loop to loop, and class to class. Without a visual representation of what you're trying to do, you'll probably crash and burn.