Maria Knobelsdorf, University of Dortmund, Germany - Didaktik der ...

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and emphasis should be rendered by italics, bold, colors, etc. Then students would have been divided into groups for reflecting on the reproducibility of this process by comparing results produced by different teams. How to record meta-information. The second phase was carried out in the gymnasium of the school. Retrospectively this was a bad idea, since the big hall was rather chaotic and groups were too dispersed to foster a fruitful discussion. The proposed task was the reproduction of a formatted text on a big copy of the text put on the floor. The copy contained the same words, but no formatting (also the alignment was slightly different). Formatting had to be codified by using the objects available in the gym. Every group of pupils (6 persons) was requested to write down the rules they used in the codification. Another team had to interpret these rules in order to decode the text formatted through physical objects and get back to the original formatted text. Most rules turned out to be ambiguous, especially when more than one kind of formatting had to be applied to the text. The objects were used mainly to mimic the formatting in the prototypical text. However, in some cases, pupils discovered a more abstract symbolic use as a means to cope with shortage of objects: for instance, two spoons were used to mark the beginning and the end of the word respectively, since there were not enough spoons to cover the whole word. Meta-language tricks. The third phase was carried out in a classroom and was organized around a game. Teams were again requested to reproduce a formatted text with objects and write down codification rules precise enough to be followed by another team. However, the game was made fun by the introduction of a “cost” for the objects. In fact, the more an object could be used to mimic a piece of formatting, the more it costed in order to promote their symbolic use, e.g., since spaghetti pasta could be easily associated to the underlying meaning, its cost was very high. The winner would be the team able to hand in an unambiguous codification with the lowest cost. The cost incentive was enough to let the pupils discover what is commonplace in mark-up languages: the use of tags at the beginning and at the end of (possibly overlapping) regions. A second round of the game was proposed without objects. Instead the pupils had only a multi-set of alphabetic characters on small pieces of paper. Some of the characters (for example, the letters that are not in the Italian alphabet: j, k, w, x, y) were not used in the words and could be easily used for weaving meta-information into the text. However, this trick was not suggested by the conductors but discovered by the pupils. Some of them tried to use the characters with a meta-meaning by placing them with a different orientation: a b for example, for meaning bold. Rediscovering formatting tools. The final phase was carried out again in a computer lab. Pupils were introduced to a special software tool able to show a formatted text according to three different views: formatted and encoded either using a simplified mark-up language or a tree of objects. They were again requested to reproduce formatted texts by working on the other representations: they saw, however, the effect of their (syntactical) manipulation in the formatted view. 150 3. EVALUATION AND FUTURE WORKS We think the experience was successful. For example, all the pupils demonstrated to have grasped the idea of a metalanguage expressed in the same alphabet of the language itself. This is considered quite an abstract concept, but it was found rather natural (even obvious) by the pupils. The link with word-processor and web technologies known to pupils was recognized. At the final recap we were also able to show that the same concepts are behind the scenes in several slightly different contexts, for example when editing Wikipedia entries. The pupils’ feedback was mostly positive: they did have fun and believe to have learned something. However, some of them found that the tasks were sometimes too easy and the part in the gym (see Section 2) was considered boring by several participants. All in all, the proposed activity turned out to be a good way for conveying abstract computing concepts to pupils of secondary schools. We are now working in refining the activity: as a mid term goal we aim at producing didactic material that should be self-contained enough to be used by independent teachers in their classes. As a first step we re-proposed the activity in an another school, with younger pupils (6th grade) under the conduction of a math teacher who did not participate in the conception. We are now studying reports and videos of the experiences: the first impression is that it worked also in this different context. We found that the algomotricity approach can be effective in presenting abstract symbolic manipulations in very concrete ways. By choosing activities clearly connected with the acquaintance of pupils with computers and tools we believe this can be very successful in elaborating a fruitful understanding of informatics concepts. 4. REFERENCES [1] A. Begel, D. D. Garcia, and S. A. Wolfman. Kinesthetic learning in the classroom. In Proc. of the 35th SIGCSE TSCSE, pages 183–184, New York, USA, 2004. ACM. [2] A. Lissoni and V. Lonati and M. Monga and A. Morpurgo and M. Torelli. Working for a leap in the general perception of computing. In A. Cortesi and F. Luccio, editor, Proc. of informatics education europe III, pages 134–139. ACM, 2008. [3] V. Lonati and M. Monga and A. Morpurgo and M. Torelli. What’s the fun in informatics? Working to capture children and teachers into the pleasure of computing. In Kalas and Mittermeir [8], pages 213–224. [4] M. Calzarossa, P. Ciancarini, L. Mich, and N. Scarabottolo. Informatics education in Italian high schools. In Kalas and Mittermeir [8], pages 31–42. [5] V. Dagien˙e. Informatics education for new millennium learners. In Kalas and Mittermeir [8], pages 9–20. [6] R. M. Felder and L. K. Silverman. Learning and teaching styles in engineering education. J. of Engineering Education, 78(7):674–681, 1988. [7] A. Giordan. From constructivisme to allosteric learning model. http://www.ldes.unige.ch/ang/publi/ articles/unesco_AG_96/unesco96.htm, 1996. [8] I. Kalas and R. T. Mittermeir, editors. ISSEP 2011, volume 7013 of LNCS. Springer, 2011.
Teachersʼ Perceptions Of The Value Of Research-Based School Lectures Jonathan Black, Paul Curzon, Chrystie Myketiak, Peter W. McOwan Queen Mary University of London London {jonathanb, pc, chrystie, pmco}@eecs.qmul.ac.uk ABSTRACT A major challenge facing secondary schools is to encourage students to take computing courses. One approach is to invite external speakers from universities or industry to give lectures. The cs4fn project, a large UK-based initiative to enthuse students about computer science, includes this approach. Speakers from Queen Mary, University of London, visit schools to talk to students about computer science research. Our interactive talks tell engaging research-based stories on topics such as artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction as well as using magic tricks to illustrate computing principles. We asked teachers to complete post-talk surveys online; in particular we were interested in whether they believed students’ perceptions of the subject had changed. They reported that their students’ views of computer science were improved, and that they felt students were more likely to take classes in computing in the future as a result of the talk. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Information Science Education – Computer Science Education General Terms Human Factors. Keywords Public engagement, outreach, recruitment, K-12, schools, teachers, lectures, magic. 1. INTRODUCTION A range of studies have looked at the effectiveness of lectures in higher education contexts, (e.g., Cooper & Foy, 1967) including those focusing on particular lecture styles such as PowerPoint lectures (e.g., Bartsch & Cobern, 2003) Despite the popularity of the lecture approach in outreach activity, there is little published evidence about its effectiveness against the aims of public engagement activity and of its value in this context. This may be because organised computer science engagement projects are often workshop-style. Lecture-style approaches may be happening ‘under the radar’, missed out of evaluation work on workshopstyle programmes. However, the lecture style is widely used and warrants study. The cs4fn project (Curzon, 2007) highlights the importance of flexible ‘take-away resources’ such as magazines and booklets rather than focusing just on workshops or lectures. We have found that this increases motivation and supports teachers (Myketiak et 151 Laura R. Meagher Technology Development Group Dairsie, Fife Laura.Meagher@ btinternet.com al., 2012). Curzon et al (2009) present evidence for the success of this approach in engaging with potential students. In previous work we have surveyed audiences for our magic shows and showed their popularity with students (e.g., Curzon & McOwan, 2008). In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of a lecture approach, surveying teachers about their own views and those of their students after seeing a talk. We focused on a range of indicators about the value of the talks but with a particular emphasis on their value in inspiring students to take their computing education further. We show that this kind of researchbased interactive lecture is highly valued by teachers and they believe it is effective in encouraging students to consider taking the subject further both at school and university. 2. METHOD We present feedback from two separate lectures given 19 times in the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 academic years. We use audience volunteers in kinaesthetic activities to illustrate core concepts. The lectures also focus on telling engaging research stories. They do not attempt to cover curriculum topics directly, nor do they directly cover career choices or discuss university courses. Each time we delivered a talk at a school, we solicited a response to an online survey from the teacher. This meant the responses could be anonymous and gave the teacher an opportunity to talk to the students about the talk before filling out the survey. The survey consisted of 16 questions. We asked teachers to identify the lecture title, and which team member delivered it. The survey went on to ask general (non-identifying) details about the audience and the school that hosted the talk. There were then a series of Likert scale questions about the value of the approach, two yes/no questions followed by a series of open questions. 3. TEACHERS’ PERCEPTION OF THE VALUE OF THE LECTURES 3.1 Quantitative results The survey received 19 teacher responses. We asked the respondents to give an overall view of the lecture with options on a 5-point scale. All (100%) were positive. 89.5% (n=17) gave the highest rating (very good) while the remaining 2 teachers rated it as good. Respondents were also asked if the lecture met their needs and if they would recommend the lecture to other schools/teachers, with yes/no options in both cases. All 19 teachers (100%) responded yes to both questions. When asked about students’ opinions, 84.2% (n=16) strongly agreed that their students had enjoyed the lectures with the remaining 3 agreeing. None were neutral or disagreed. 78.9%
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Fakultät für Mathematik, Informat
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Program Committee Michal Armoni Wei
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Challenge and Creativity: Students
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Challenges in Computer Science Educ
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These echo a 2008 report from the N
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examples, and in practice teachers
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Figure 3: A trace of bubble sort fr
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computer science, and with the less
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effect of different factors on the
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Performance Expectancy (PE) Satisfa
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for active CS teachers. Furthermore
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participants change between the roo
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Altogether 830 participants visited
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8. REFERENCES [1] Bell, T. et al. 2
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Agile Projects in High School Compu
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the target audience. This phase is
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longer than one to two weeks (which
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[23] Huynh, H. and Feldt, L. S. 197
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Ways of Planning Lessons on the Top
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other topic. The reasons given vari
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algorithm or a product is viewed as
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However, even when such learning th
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(Some) Grand Challenges of Computer
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in the world, for example, as descr
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