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

for active CS teachers. Furthermore, InfoSphere represents a
potent research environment, where we can explore and analyze
innovative learning methods, educational designs and media with
school students. To set up research experiments would be a lot
harder to achieve in regular school classes.
2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
There is ongoing research about extracurricular learning since
several years. In 1994 Griffin described how learning in informal
science settings would be most effective [11]. She looked into the
students’ view of learning in such informal settings and identified
orientation and preparation as the most important factors.
Otherwise the unknown learning environment attracts most of the
attention instead of the workshop itself. Thus, we connect our
workshops with topics of regular school lessons. More
specifically regarding extracurricular learning environments,
Euler scrutinized how school students can act as researchers and
what the resulting learning effects can be [9]. The main result is
that it is important for the school students to learn on their own,
which means they have to actively work with the contents instead
of just listening to a teacher. Based on these findings we design
our workshops with large proportions of action-oriented learning.
In addition, Guderian studied the learning effects of pupils in the
age of 10 to 14 after repeated visits of a physics lab [12]. In
accordance to his findings we offer additional workshops for
individual participants in order to keep up and raise students’
interest.
As a consequence of current findings about extracurricular
learning environments and with regard to research results
concerning learning concepts for STEM topics, we design our
workshops to facilitate explorative, action-oriented learning. So
far, there is little research about this didactical learning concept in
the field of CS, but results from other STEM fields can also be
applied to InfoSphere. For example, Bell has focused on
experimental learning in physics [4]. He worked out the following
activity model (translated by the authors):
Table 1. Activity model following Bell
1. defining
2. exploring
3. reflecting
orienting
formulating the problem
assuming
planning
searching for information
expressing knowledge / modeling
experimenting
analyzing / finding results
presenting
discussing / reflecting
applying
For InfoSphere workshops we distinguish three phases of defining
the problem, exploring by planning/modeling/experimenting and
reflecting by presenting/discussing learning and working results.
The first stage focusses on the students’ self-directed process of
finding and defining the problem. An authentic, all-day situation
27
is presented to the students and questions lead them to discover a
problem to be solved. The second stage is the main working phase
during the InfoSphere workshops. The participants work in
groups to solve tasks on different complexity levels. Thereby, we
follow a scheme leaning towards a software developing process of
planning, modeling, experimenting and realization. In the third
stage we encourage reflection and additionally promote students’
communication and presenting skills by letting them present their
findings to the other participants.
Aepkers et al. [1] studied exploratory, inquiry-based learning in
general. Many of their findings describe effects on the learning
process which are independent of the content and thus are applied
to InfoSphere workshops as well.
One specific goal of InfoSphere is to have participants develop a
more realistic concept of the field of CS. Studies about novices’
expectations and prior knowledge of CS e.g. [21] and [8] show
that the general perception of CS does not match well with reality.
Therefore, we consider it important to foster a more realistic
perception of CS, and to avoid stereotypes, and raise an interest
for elective CS courses. In detail, Knobelsdorf evaluated the
motives of successful CS university students and explored reasons
for dropping out. Her analyses show that the most mentioned
reason for problems in CS studies is “too challenging
requirements” followed by “too low mathematical prior
knowledge”, “lack of time” and “poor motivation” [16]. To avoid
students from enrolling into a CS university program with wrong
expectations we also inform about the contents and requirement of
CS study programs. This cannot be achieved only in InfoSphere
workshops. We rather educate (future) CS teachers as multipliers,
who observe the misconceptions concerning CS during
workshops and while preparing InfoSphere learning media. For
the other mentioned problems we also utilize InfoSphere for
freshman before they start their study program in prep courses.
Also in the first two terms we offer InfoSphere workshops for
students who experience difficulties in their normal courses.
These workshops provide them with an alternative access to the
current topics and give them a second chance catch up and pass
the exam. These uses are not further described in the following of
this paper; see [2] and [14] for more details.
3. INFOSPHERE CONCEPT
In order to enable building a broader perception of CS we select
exemplary topics from many different fields to demonstrate the
wide range of CS. The collection of workshop topics is based on
fundamental ideas of CS as described by Schwill [22]. In
addition, we took German CS school curricula as well as
educational standards [10] into account and link our workshops to
regular school lessons [6].
Furthermore, InfoSphere is targeted at a variety of target groups:
school students, university students in CS teacher training, CS
teachers, as well as other professional or non-professional people
with an interest in CS. The following subsection describes the
advantages for all target groups in more detail.
3.1 Target Groups
First of all, for primary and secondary school students InfoSphere
is the place to get in contact with CS. They can gain an insight
into the world of informatics without feeling school pressure. All
the workshops are held by students in teacher training of RWTH
Aachen University. So the participants’ performance does not
influence their school grades. Besides the possibility to visit