Effectiveness of Parsons Problems I first heard of Parsons Problems thanks to CS Teaching Tips. They define these problems as follows:


  "Parsons problems are problems where students build programs from
  ordering small chunks of provided code."


An example can be found here.

When I research these, I see very little in terms of classroom resources. I find a handful of articles discussing them but not many examples of them in practice. On the surface, these problems -- emphasizing logic and structure separate from syntax -- could be a great activity at varying levels of experience and ability.

What skills or concepts have you used (or would you use) Parsons Problems to teach/reinforce?
I used a Parsons problem to teach functions. I used Google Slides to put different colored text boxes on one slide and gave the students instructions to arrange the text boxes in the proper order. A screenshot of what the activity looked like is below:



I wanted students to have experience with the ordering of function calls in C. There are technically two correct ways to approach this, but because I specify the requirement to use each block, there's only solution here:



Seeing how information gets passed from function to function and how to lay out the structure was helpful for students. Focusing on those skills outside of/separate from the syntax helped because students only had to worry about one thing at a time.

As I look ahead to next year, I want to do more of these problems, especially when teaching loops and sorting algorithms. They are quick and simple to make and differentiate instruction effectively. In the context of AP CSP, they provide great practice for the AP Exam which includes a number of code samples to read and understand.