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

12 Smartphone-Remote Control for Lego-
NXTs [13]
18-19
13 Insight into Computer Graphics 18-19
These workshops have been designed with learning materials and
detailed course plans by students in teacher training as seminar
papers or thesis projects. Furthermore, some students work on the
integration of the workshops into school lessons according to the
German CS curriculum [19] and to educational standard
recommendations of the German society for CS (GI) [10].
4.2 Didactic Concept
The fundamental concept of the InfoSphere workshops is
explorative learning. The learning environment supports students
to learn self-directed, which allows for differentiation between
individual learners. We explicitly aim at students who are not yet
interested in STEM topics and not only at highly motivated
students who come to the lab in their spare time. Therefore,
InfoSphere workshops contain open tasks which can be solved on
different complexity levels. Some workshops also offer a lot of
additional tasks, so very good students are challenged further.
Phases in lecture style are reduced to a minimum (microteaching).
Most tasks in InfoSphere are solved in teams with
hands-on materials.
The workshops can either be integrated into a sequence of school
lessons or visited as separate extracurricular learning event. In
future, we are going to design more learning materials to better
incorporate workshops in regular sequences of school lessons.
This should make it easier to integrate a study trip into the school
curriculum [11]. On the other hand, separate workshops are
necessary for all the students, who are not taking up CS in school
yet.
Our aim is to correct the social stereotype of computer scientists.
Thus, InfoSphere workshops demonstrate that CS is not only
attractive for “computer freaks”. We specifically address students
who did not choose to study CS in school (yet), only because of a
wrong CS perception. On the other hand, we also inform
InfoSphere visitors, who seem already interested in the field, what
it means to study CS at a university. As mentioned in section 2
many CS students admit that they had a different idea about
studying CS before enrolling into a program. Many professional
computer scientists develop innovative software which is a
creative process. That is why we explicitly value learning
materials which encourage participants to creative problem
solving. For example the workshop “Artificial Intelligence” ends
up with the open task to implement a chat bot. For most
InfoSphere tasks and projects there is not only one correct
solution. At the end of the workshops students are asked to
present their solutions and describe the problems they
encountered during the solution process. discussion phases
encourage reflecting what computational thinking can mean while
increasing the students’ communication skills by the way. The
workshop “Easily Programming with Scratch” is designed with
the jigsaw teaching technique where is it necessary to help each
other to achieve the goal within the whole group. Good
communication skills will enable the students to learn and work in
collaborative environments in their further life.
Besides the social skills mentioned above many university
students admit that they have not expected how much
mathematics is expected in CS studies. To encounter wrong
expectations, there are also workshops which explicitly make
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mathematics as the foundation of many areas in CS visible. The
“Insight into Computer Graphics” workshop combines matrix
calculations with the corresponding visual effects on graphical
objects. The students get to know how important mathematic
foundations are to present images on a screen. They learn how
matrix computations allow the enlargement, the translation and
the rotation of any object in a three-dimensional coordinate
system and furthermore which mathematical calculations are
needed to represent a three-dimensional object on a twodimensional
screen.
In addition to choosing the right contents it is also important to
utilize the appropriate methodology and learning media.
Depending on the topic and the age of the target group the course
format, technologies, and materials are selected from the variety
of our educational pool. One of our important messages is that
technologies can not only be used as they are but also be designed
and adapted. For example in our two workshops “GUI-
Programming for Android” and “Smartphone-Remote Control for
Lego-NXTs” [15] the participants learn to program their own
Android-Apps, so they see smartphones not only as useful devices
but experience them also as platform which they can manipulate
and design according to their own imagination. Simultaneously,
we show them the significance of programming as a tool.
Closing up this section there are some didactical decisions which
are independent of the subject of the learning environment but
nevertheless very important for its success. To offer a learning
environment without school pressure the workshops are held by
university students. The unknown learning environment and the
new and young tutors enable a learning situation which is very
different from regular school lessons. That is one reason declared
by several school students who were not interested in CS courses
at school, but were quite motivated and interested when
participating in an InfoSphere workshop. To further support these
students we also offer workshops with individual registration.
These workshops have some other unique effects: the students
experience to learn in groups with unknown students. So they
learn to communicate with each other and to solve the problems in
teams. In addition the participants work in groups of students of
different ages and prior knowledge, e.g. the workshop “Treasure
hunt with cryptographic methods” [5] is open to kids at the age of
11 to 14. So they can learn from each other and combine their
different skills to reach the best possible result. Thereby we try to
support various competencies which are useful in school,
university and vocational training.
5. EVALUATION
In general it is very interesting to conduct research for all three
target groups to evaluate what are the main advantages of an
extracurricular learning environment for CS for them. Currently
we focus on the school students’ view. We explore how a visit of
the InfoSphere can change the students’ conception of CS. As
described above our aim is to counteract social stereotypes about
computer scientists and thus try to raise the number of school and
university students in CS and to reduce the dropout rate.
To examine the changes of the students’ conception of CS we
conduct a quantitative evaluation before and after the workshops.
For that purpose we developed two online questionnaires with
partly equal questions. The students fill out the first one in school
some days before their trip and the second one at the end of the
workshop. In order to correlate the two answers we integrate a
code into the questionnaires to pseudonymise the data sets.