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

motivated to learn something unless the immediate benefits are
clear. Hence, CS teachers might experience even greater
difficulties in introducing the professional CS culture as
legitimate, let alone the desired one. Simple introductory
problems previously used to teach programming with gradual
levels of difficulty, such as a program that prints "hello world"
on the screen, might influence students' judgment for the worse
about the worthiness of taking CS classes given that they can
(or know someone who can) achieve more attractive outcomes in
the use of the computer. Students' high level of frustration and
their low self-reliance is also an obstacle to CS education.
Debugging, for example, can be frustrating. Hence, educators
face the tension between the need to provide students with
attractive problems and less “hello-world”-like problems, so that
the students will become engaged in their solution, while taking
into consideration students’ “newcomerness” programming
capabilities.
This concern leads educators to offer students problems the
students might value as worth of their efforts, such as the
development of computer games [11] and the processing of
media [8, 9]. Some teach introductory courses using visual
programming environments that enable work processes more
reminiscent of students’ experience with the user interface. For
example, Alice 3 [5] enables students to program 3-D characters
using a graphical drag-and- drop programming. Similarly,
Scratch was designed to motivate all students to program [17].
These environments enabled teachers to provide problems that
students perceive as attractive while at the same time avoiding or
postponing frustrating actions, such as debugging syntax.
Both approaches rely on students' computer-related capital, as
users, in an attempt to meet students where they are, provide
them with an immediate sense of the relevance of school
experience to their lives, and at the same time introduce them to
the principles in programming in a way that the students might
value and will be motivated to further their experience.
Educators, however, should keep in mind that meeting students
where they are should not aspire to leave them in their current
cultural horizons, but rather to help the students expand their
cultural perspective and cross the boundaries towards the
professional culture.
6. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
The challenges articulated in this paper emerge from the
recognized need to transform schooling so that it better prepares
students for life within a digitalized and globalized world. The
cultural-encounter metaphor is useful to detect challenges as
interaction between two (or more) intertwined cultures. Part of
the resolution of these challenges includes the awareness of
educators of the cultural capital of their students, accumulated
through the students’ in and out-of school experience with ICT.
The other part is to bridge between students’ current
perspectives and the desired target practices and values. To this
end, in previous studies [1], it has been suggested that
educational situations should be designed as fertile zones of
cultural encounter (FZCE), a metaphorical zone that enables
using the students’ cultural capital as a bridge to the perspective
represented by the teachers. FZCE occurs when the educational
milieu clearly reflects the distinction between the intertwined
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cultures, while making the cultural tools represented by the
instructional setting accessible and relevant to the students.
Creating FZCEs for today’s students is a great challenge. First,
the target is complicated: it is about enculturation within the CS
professional culture while, at the same time, nurturing students’
life-long learning capacities. Moreover, as part of the general
transformation in school, instructional milieus should be
designed with more student-centeredness, allowing for and
encouraging students to manage their learning actions. However,
CS has great potential to serve as an arena to teach 21 st century
skills in ways students perceive as relevant and therefore are
more motivated to invest mental effort.
7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I thank M. Ben-Ari and S. Pollack for their insightful comments.
8. REFERENCES
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