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

Uncovering Structure behind Function – the experiment as
teaching method in computer science education
ABSTRACT
There are lots of reports about activities that aim at fostering and
maintaining interest in computing. These activities rely on different
ideas that should help to involve novices and young learners.
In this article examples are given and explained from a disciplinespecific
perspective based on the notion of a dual nature of digital
artifacts, which has to be reconstructed and integrated during the
process of computer science education. The claim is that learners
either focus on the internal computational properties: the structure,
or on the more external reasons to use them: the function –
but rarely are able to develop an integrated perspective on both
sides. Therefore learning experiences should be designed to
bridge these perspectives and enable to perceive the dual nature of
digital artifacts. This idea of bridges between structure and function
is used to design and analyze learning activities with regard
to their potential in fostering and maintaining interest in computer
science, especially to those not already interested. This article
presents and discusses three examples for such experiments.
Based on this, guidelines for experiments as teaching method, and
questions for further research are derived.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K3.2 [Computers & Education]: Computer and Information
Science Education – computer science education, information
systems education.
General Terms
Experimentation, Human Factors.
Keywords
Secondary CS Education, K-12, Didactics, CS Ed Research,
Pedagogy, Gender, Teaching Methods, Dual Nature, Duality
Reconstruction, Experiment
1. INTRODUCTION
Teaching computer science (CS) often faces problems like low
enrollments, low retention, and low ratio of female computer
science students. As these are urgent concerns, a lot of – often
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Conference’12, Month 1–2, 2010, City, State, Country.
Copyright 2010 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0010…$10.00.
Carsten Schulte
Freie Universität Berlin
Computing Education Research
Königin-Luise Str. 24
14195 Berlin Germany
schulte@inf.fu-berlin.de
44
locally successful – initiatives and activities take place, but still, in
general the problems remain unsolved.
Here only a fraction of such activities can be listed (and of course
sometimes there are overlaps between the different variants):
CS for fun / magical computer science, CS unplugged [6, 7,
9]: These activities are introducing motivational examples to
foster interest and motivation without the use of computers,
in order to refocus attention from the ‘technical or usage
skills’ to the ‘thinking skills’ involved and useful in everyday
life.
Summer Schools, working groups, and weekend activities:
Their aim is to enable a gentle introduction without a steep
learning curve, without grades, and to help getting in contact
with peers (e.g. courses designed specifically for female novices),
in order to lower the entry barriers to computer science.
Competitions in different organizational forms, local, national
or international, or related to specific tools like pedagogical
IDE’s, robotics or others (see [5]): Competitions foster
high engagement in the activities, and provide feedback from
the engagement itself, but also from comparing results to
others.
Digital communities, like e.g. Scratch [22], build around a
tool/topic: In general, they are aiming at similar aspects like
the above mentioned summer schools, but provide more ongoing
support.
Innovation in the computer science classroom: This is often
a mix of the above mentioned activities, but also specific
ideas and interventions to foster interest. Like e.g. media
computing [13], or computer science in context [29].
Overall, there are lots of activities reported, that aim at fostering
and maintaining interest in the computing disciplines (see e.g.. [1,
10, 35, 36] for a comparison and evaluation of such types of
activities). These activities rely on different ideas that should help
to engage novices and young learners. While these ideas often
denote theories from other domains—like psychology with regard
to motivation or attribution—in this article, a simple idea is presented
which can be used to analyze and describe such activities
and predict effects on learners with different attitudes, and – as the
given examples should demonstrate – is powerful enough to drive
the development of new activities.
2. THE SITUATION IN CS ED
The idea of introducing experiments draws on prevalent topics
debated in CS Ed (section 2.1 ). Although a myriad of activities