Mr. Higgins’ Blog

After eight weeks working through the Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 BASICS bookwith my students and nearly half way through our semester of Visual Basic, I felt a review of the book so far was warrented.

We have covered the following…

1: A First Look at Microsoft Visual Basic
2: Forms, Controls, and Properties
3: Events and Code
4: Mathematical Operators
5: Data Types and Variables
6: Exponentiation, Order of Operations, and Error Handling
7: Strings and Decimal Types
8: If Statements
9: Nested If Statements and Radio Buttons

The way I go through the book is that I explain or show a topic that is in the book and we either read more in the book or do a program together as a class.  The students understand the book is used for learning visual basic; however, they bring up the point about why the book doesn’t have more programs that are left almost exclusively to the reader.  I had to supplement the book after watching some of the students get too used to being given the code. 

Overall Positives

1. Nice job of fully describing the user interface and application properties

2. A pace that is xlow for those who don’t know programming and fast for those that already are aware of programming concepts

3. Gives enough textual information for students to understand terminology used in Visual Basic programming

Overall Negatives

1. Students seem to become naturally used to copying code from the book unless you use supplements.  I supplementing by having them create a Leap Frog game among about 6 different programs we created as a way to go away from the code copying

2. Some of the review questions are very simple while others are confusing to the students

As a first year teacher, my evaluation is based from the student feedback and the fact that this is my first time teaching the class and the only book I have ever used.