Teach Computer Science

I will look at how cognitive load theory (CLT) can help us to teach computer science and particularly coding. CLT is a theory of how we learn and gain knowledge. The principal character in this field is John Sweller who is an Australian educational psychologist. It took a while for his ideas to gain acceptance in the scientific community, but they are uncontroversial and are now filtering down to secondary schools in the UK, but more slowly than they perhaps should. CLT is important for teachers because it identifies the most effective teaching methods for learning. But before I write about CLT further I need to present a simple model for how human memory works. Memory is split into short term and long term memory. Short term memory has limited capacity and can hold between three and seven chunks of information. We are consciously aware of what we are holding in short term memory. Long term memory has unlimited capacity. For us to learn anything it first needs to be transferre...