I hadn't, thanks! Spaced repetition is certainly a useful tool. I always try to start every lecture with one or two review problems (that I call "brick problems", making sure the previous brick row is solid before building on it).
I don't assign homework anymore because I have no interest in grading AI output (and even less interest in asking AI to grade AI output). The inverted classroom approach works well for me. Students read the textbook on their own (and I encourage them to use office hours, collaborate, or use AI tools if they need more explanations), doing checkpoint exercises to make sure they understand the material, and class time is spent on working problems.
My son was really into Brio trains when he was young, and I wrote a program to visually design layouts by placing track segments one after the other. The program took that tolerance into account, and gave a score to the layout based on how much it had to force the pieces together. I had the idea of adding some automation to design complex networks but that never materialized.
I teach linear algebra in college, and during our first class, I urge all my students to watch this series as soon as possible. It's great at giving them a geometrical understanding of what's going on, so they feel more motivated to learn the theorems and do computation (and already develop some intuition as to why the theorems are true).
In addition to the points listed, it gives the algorithm nerds the opportunity to show their overqualification by whipping out the O(n) median algorithm and proving that it works in linear time.
That kind of innovation is not always for the best. As an example, after hearing so much praise about the kuru-toga mechanical pencil, which rotates the lead as you write so it stays sharp longer, I went and bought one. I hate it. The rotation mechanism means the lead doesn't stay in place but has a weird "give" to it, which I notice every time I raise the pen and put it back to the paper. It's very small, a fraction of a millimeter, but it is noticeable and distracting. For me, the cure is a lot worse than the disease. I went back to my 10-year-old Pentel P205 which is stable as a rock.
I bought a Filco Majestouch with Cherry blues, 15 to 20 years ago. I'm still using it, and don't plan on stopping. It's not wireless and doesn't have backlighting or RGB lights on it, but I don't care about any of that. It just works and feels great. It was expensive but worth every dollar — and might very well outlive me.
I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment.
Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one.
We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I taught them about assembly language and told them about the registers, instructions, and addressing modes of the chip, memory map and monitor routines of the Apple, and after that we went and wrote a few programs together, mostly using the low-resolution graphics mode (40x40): a drawing program, a bouncing ball, culminating in hand-rolled sprites with simple collision detection.
Their assignment is to write a simple program (I suggested a low-res game like Snake or Tetris but they can do whatever they want provided they tell me about it and I okay it), demo their program, and then explain to the class how it works.
At first they hated the line editor. But then a very interesting thing happened. They started thinking about their code before writing it. Planning. Discussing things in advance. Everything we told them they should do before coding in previous classes, but they didn't do because a powerful editor was right there so why not use it?...
And then they started to get used to the line editor. They told me they didn't need to really see the code on the screen, it was in their head.
They will of course go back to modern tools after class is finished, but I think it's good for them to have this kind of experience.
I don't assign homework anymore because I have no interest in grading AI output (and even less interest in asking AI to grade AI output). The inverted classroom approach works well for me. Students read the textbook on their own (and I encourage them to use office hours, collaborate, or use AI tools if they need more explanations), doing checkpoint exercises to make sure they understand the material, and class time is spent on working problems.