When a programming teacher gets you to write out code by hand and then says "pretend to run it"

Robot Turtles is a board game built around this concept. My daughters love it. One person writes a program by putting command cards in sequence. Another person then "runs" the program by "executing" each command card in turn, and both get to see whether or not their program gets their turtle to the goal.

@Theo20185 This concept is great to teach kids about programming and is a lot of fun.
But not so fun when it's your second year in college and you have to write out, word for word, each function and variable and then proceed to draw a mockup of what you expect your ouput to be.
Not what I expected for second year college programming :/

@Meadowcottage We did something similar in like the first coding class that I had in college (my course is aimed at being accessible even for people that dont have any experience with coding)

I still remember first years at the university when you had to write code to a sheet of paper when doing programming exams.

It's better than your teacher just handing you the manual and exspect you to learn it. That was my first exsperience with coding.

@Meadowcottage Just get through it. By your fourth year, you will get group project members who will write code seemingly without thought and does nothing near what is expected. I've had debugging sessions where I have pulled out a sheet of paper to trace the code by hand. I've had a few Aha! moments with that.