In the courses I teach, I have exercises after many of the sections. Over the past few weeks, I've been adding more exercises, and evaluating them for appropriateness.

Overall, I try to make sure that the exercises provide:

• practice: they should repeat the things learned in that section, rather than introducing new ideas or testing students' cleverness
• confidence: student should feel more confident at the end of a section, rather than being more impressed with how much there is they could still learn

The latter point is the one I'm re-evaluating things for now.

There's a notion that exercises should "teach" you things and be "challenging". The first time I wrote exercises for courses, years ago, my exercises were about this. Few students completed them. I realized that I had fallen into the trap of assuming that people always want to be challenged.

In fact, spending an hour or two learning new concepts itself is challenging--the exercises should be a chance to repeat what they've learned, to try out their shaky legs on these new skills, and to feel good about what they've learned.

When I was younger, I was a semi-serious chess student. While some people assume that kids and adults should learn chess by studying Grandmaster games and by playing people who will totally tromp all over them, the best chess teacher I ever met had a very different perspective: students learn more when they win about 80% of their games.

A few years ago, my friend's son, Lucien, began to play chess, and I would play with him. Being a young kid against an experienced adult, I could have beaten him every time. I didn't want to do that. I could have played badly, and made bad mistakes. I didn't want to do that, either--he might have assumed these were good moves. So, instead, we invented a new protocol: I would play, seriously, against him. But at any given point, he could opt to switch sides with me. He could learn good skills. He could still have the (important!) effect of feeling like a winner. It worked well.

So, I've been adding lots of hints to the existing exercises, and aiming as my goal that 80% of the students complete the exercises for a section, and that 80% get them right. (Of course, I still keep advanced exercises on the next page, for those students who come, having already learned Plone and Python well, and who want something more challenging to sink their teeth into.)

We'll see how it goes.