There’s a sentence that sounds positive in a Computer Science classroom:
“I get it.”
But if you’ve taught long enough, you know this sentence often means very little when the exam paper arrives.
Because understanding something once is not what carries students through unfamiliar questions.
Habits do.
The part we don’t talk about
James Clear, in Atomic Habits, makes a simple point:
We don’t rise to the level of our goals.
We fall to the level of our habits.
This shows up very clearly in Computer Science lessons.
Students don’t succeed because they understood an algorithm in class.
They succeed because they have a habit of thinking through problems in a familiar way.
And that habit is built through repetition.
Why “understanding” is unreliable
Understanding is fragile.
Change the numbers.
Change the wording.
Add a small twist.
Suddenly, the student who “got it” is unsure where to start.
Because they didn’t build a habit.
They had a moment of clarity.
Those are not the same thing.
What repetition really builds
Every trace table.
Every dry run.
Every similar exam question.
These aren’t just tasks.
They are reps.
And reps build thinking habits.
By the fifth or sixth time, students are no longer asking, “What do I do?”
They just start.
That’s the shift.
Why this feels slow in lessons
Repetition doesn’t look impressive.
Students feel like they are doing the same thing again.
Teachers feel like they are not “moving on.”
But something important is happening underneath:
The thinking is becoming automatic.
Just like a habit.
A small shift in how we frame it
Instead of saying:
“You need to understand this.”
Try:
“You need to get used to this thinking.”
This removes the pressure to be clever and replaces it with something students can control:
Practice.
Repetition.
Familiarity.
What this can look like in practice
- Several trace tables, not one
- Dry runs with different values
- Similar question structures on purpose
- Deliberately repeating the process before moving on
Not because students didn’t understand.
Because habits take more than one attempt.
The quiet truth many teachers notice
The students who make the most progress are often not the quickest thinkers.
They are the ones who have built the strongest habits around how to approach problems.
They don’t panic when the question changes.
They recognise the thinking.
A reminder worth having visible
Repetition builds the habit.
The habit builds the result.
Computer Science doesn’t just reward intelligence.
It rewards students who have repeated the thinking so many times that it becomes a habit.
And habits are far more reliable than moments of understanding.