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

However, even when such learning theories get accepted by
teachers, they are sometimes superficially interpreted and
applied. For example, adopting a Logo or Logo-like environment
for teaching programming, does not necessarily mean that a
constructivism teaching approach has also been "automatically"
adopted. The teaching scenario plays an important role too in
achieving good learning results. Asking students to print 10 or
more times a “Hello world” message in Scratch, in order to
comprehend the “repeat N times” programming construct, cannot
be considered as a good example of constructivism.
Comprehending the potential benefits of various learning theories
and using them as tools for devising successful didactical
interventions cannot be easily taught to trainers and mainly
applied by them. The theories that seem to be more popular
among trainers are collaborative learning, constructivism,
exploratory/discovery learning, social development theory and
cultural context. The most referenced (by trainers) proponents of
such theories are Piaget, Vygotsky and Bruner. Unfortunately,
this "popularity" does not seem to be applied into teaching
actions: in most cases, trainers are using typical teaching methods
in their practice, claiming however that these methods are
constructivist ones. In fact, the example of learning theories to
which we refer is of great importance, because it is part of the socalled
"theoretical topics" for which, too often, teachers and
consequently their trainers, express strong objections.
More precisely, an important obstacle of the training process lies
in the unwillingness of some trainers to participate actively in
training seminars or courses on topics they believe that have a
theoretical nature and/or they already have experience in. It is
not that trainers don't believe Vygotsky's Theory or Piaget's
points of view: they believe that it is useless to learn any learning
theory - such theories have nothing to do with "real" teaching and
real classes. A typical example is the teaching of programming
itself, a topic that most Informatics teachers have more or less
experienced. The personal experience of trainers is definitely
important, but the experience that has been gathered from decades
of rigorous research on the teaching and learning of programming
is equally, or even more, important. Several teachers have little or
no knowledge of the results of such research and unfortunately
some of them do not get easily persuaded that these results can
truly help them in teaching programming more successfully. It is
not a matter of theory, it is a matter of practice. The educator has
to work heavily on making such a seminar interesting for trainers.
The educator has to present research results along with specific
examples for utilizing them in order to devise examples and
assignments with the aim of avoiding common misconceptions
and difficulties that are the source of students' more severe errors.
So, subjects such as "learning theories" and didactic concepts, for
example "misconceptions of students", are not considered as
really useful. The integration of programming into the school
curriculum requires a specific didactic transposition: scientific
knowledge and professional practice is transferred to the school
and included in the educational context [1]. Thus, the concepts are
simplified to make them more easily understood; the course is
organized into 45-50-minute sessions, which is the duration of a
teaching period in Greek schools; the subject matter has been
organized into introductory units, exercises, questions, problems.
However, during this transposition of concepts into the school
environment, another transformation takes place: namely, the
school education of an entire scientific field favours certain types
of problems, while marginalizing other aspects of the key
concepts, such as algorithms, data structures, and programming
85
generally. For example, data structures as a means of encoding
entities of the external world, such as images, text, etc., are rarely
referred to in the school environment. Trainee-trainers in many
cases did not fully acknowledge the importance of teaching or the
activities on such issues, considering them of no use, since they
were not directly related to current concepts of programming – at
least the “school version” of programming.
Concepts, such as the didactic contract and the didactic
transposition, research data related to concepts such as variable,
repetition and selection structures, and data about teaching
recursion are included in the curriculum of PAKE. Empirical
research on the different programming environments is included
as well. This approach allowed a clear distinction between the
teaching scenarios and the training scenarios, as the theoretical
scheme of reciprocal interactions and "observations" of a teaching
system (see Figure 1) that clearly defines the framework within
which these teaching interactions take place. The theoretical
approach also (was supposed that) helped the understanding of
didactic phenomena as phenomena, i.e. as observable events that
are not random, but have causes producing them and therefore can
be studied. As we stated earlier, theory of Didactics of
Informatics and especially of programming was accepted by the
trainers - but it is almost sure that they are not all convinced for
the value and usefulness of such "theoretical" subjects.
It is also worth noting that, in a general way, when trainers are
invited to invent new problems and situations for teaching new
concepts, they often produce very questionable examples and
scenarios. For instance, as mentioned earlier, when they were
asked to invent situations for the introduction of the repetitive
structure in Logo-like environments, usually they adopted a
typical approach: draw a "regular" geometrical figure - such as a
regular polygon - with the help of the "turtle" and show step-bystep
how this figure could be constructed directly with a repetitive
statement. However, sometimes the proposed figures are very
complex and practically impossible to be constructed by young
pupils. In other cases, the proposed initial activities are totally
inappropriate for an introduction to repetitive statements, since
they deal with complex arithmetic operations.
Teachers in general are enthusiastic with educational
programming environments that have adopted more or less the
notion of game-based learning, such as Kodu, GameMaker and
especially Scratch. These environments are considered to
motivate students and engage them in the cognitive demanding
process of programming. Environments that offer some kind of
structure editor for developing programs and avoiding syntax
errors are considered by teachers even more effective for
introducing young students to programming. It is possible that
trainers are very positive for this kind of environments, because
they believe that programming is boring for young pupils. So, the
adoption of "cool" environments and programming goals like the
construction of games could be a motivation for the pupils.
In spite of that, a significant number of teachers do not decide to
use such environments in cases where programming is part of the
written exams that take place at the end of the school year, in the
3 rd grade of Gymnasium for example. Their main argument is that
there is no way to examine in paper students' knowledge of
programming, since they were not obliged to learn the syntax of
the language. Of course, this argument is not valid since there are
several ways of examining students’ knowledge, such as
providing them pictures of statements, giving them segments of
code to find bugs, or fill in and so on. After all, the curriculum