Five minutes at the door, every class. If you took Grade 11 here the routines will look familiar, and one thing has changed underneath them: the code on the board is usually not yours. It was written by somebody who is not in the room, who is not available for questions, and who was not thinking about you when they wrote it. Working out what it does, whether it is right, and whether you would let it into your project — that is the year.
| Warm-up | What it trains |
|---|---|
| Predict the Output | Reading objects closely enough to commit |
| Spot the Bug | Finding faults by reading, not by re-running |
| Trace It | Following a call stack the way Python does |
| Which One Doesn’t Belong | Defending a design choice out loud |
| Name That Error | Diagnosing a crash in code you did not write |
| Tech Headlines | Weighing claims made about technology |
| Read the Diff | Judging a change before it lands |
Read the Diff is the new one, and it is the one that will feel most like a job. A change goes up on the board exactly as version control shows it — lines removed, lines added, nothing else — and the room decides whether to approve it. By the time your team is building The Software Project, you will be doing this for real, on each other’s work, several times a week.
The routines cost five minutes and pay across the whole course. Reading closely, naming a fault precisely, and saying “not yet, and here is why” without making it personal are not talents. They are reps.