Wolff‐Michael Roth introduced the term ‘Apria’ to refer to the paradox of being a learner: how can we intentionally direct ourselves toward learning something new, when we necessarily do not yet understand – nor are we even able to perceive – the very thing that we seek to know?
Roth studied this in the context of high school students learning physics, showing how students were unable to draw the expected pedagogical lessons from classroom physics demonstrations. Because the students had not yet developed the underlying conceptual physics understandings, they literally did not perceive the behaviors of the instrumental apparatus as intended.
In the field of computer science, many of us have been surprised by the lasting result of the Rainfall problem, originally constructed and studied by Elliot Soloway. This work demonstrated the difficulty that beginning computing students have in composing a program that involves a loop, summation variable, and sentinel exit value.
As computer scientists, we are surprised when we learn of the enduring result of Soloway’s work, because the rainfall problem seems so easy. But this is because we’ve completely forgotten our own earlier novice minds, and we can’t imagine not knowing how to immediately solve what appears as a trivial problem. As a pathology, psychologists refer to this as ‘psychogenic amnesia’,’ but constructivists recognize this as a common aspect of learning.
These two challenges go hand in hand: the fundamental Apria of learning, and our own forgetfulness of learning afterward. We often pay attention on improving our teaching, but here, I will focus on the experience of being a learner in computer science. I will present a personal learning story of two years of effort in coming to understand Bayes Nets and Hidden Markov Models, a flipped classroom learning environment I created with one of the seminal MOOCs (Thrum and Nerving’s Fall 2011 AI Class), and two very different ‘Computing I’ courses.
Mark Audial has highlighted the looming ‘MOOC‐apocalypse’ – the belief that a combination of video lessons, auto‐graded assignments, and discussion forums can provide adequate learning environments for our students, coupled with academic leadership taking action on this belief by replacing conventionally‐taught courses with MOOCs. While there is evidence that MOOCs are effective for advanced, ‘auto‐didactic’ students, the evidence that MOOCs work for beginning or less self‐directed learners is scant (if it exists at all). And when we look broadly across our student body, it’s apparent that we have many more beginning students than advanced ones.
Ultimately, Fred Martin would argue that learning is messy, unpredictable, frustrating, and basically not at all fun – until it turns into elation and joy. Our beginning students deserve better than MOOCs: they deserve our personal attention. By better understanding the true nature of learning, we will be more able to make this case.
Testing & Ask-Elle
Adding testing to Ask‐Elle: An Interactive Functional Programming Tutor: in this demonstration ASK‐ELLE is introduced: a Haskell tutor. ASK‐ELLE supports the incremental development of Haskell programs. ASK‐ELLE checks that a student follows one of the model solutions provided by a teacher. It can recognise many incomplete variants of the model solutions, it can give hints on how to proceed with solving a programming exercise, and feedback on incomplete student programs, but if a student implements an incorrect solution, or a solution that differs from the model solutions, ASK‐ELLE cannot give feedback. For this reason, we have added testing to ASK‐ELLE.
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CSERC: CS for Young Children
Computer science education often faces problems related to passive teaching and curricular constraints. These problems distort the students’ perception of computer science and thus lead to lack of interest in the curriculum and in related professions. The main goals of the project reported in this paper are (1) to excite and motivate students in computer science through creative activities, and (2) to introduce the idea of becoming creators of digital media through programming instead of remaining passive learners.
Based on the above goals, the presenters conducted field studies, collected data through student interviews, qualitatively analyzed the data and summarized the lessons learned through the project. Specifically, a group of researchers and artists designed and implemented two 2‐day workshops involving a total of 29 students, exploring their experiences with the program. The workshops were based on the open source software Scratch, as well as the creative use of recycled materials. The qualitative approach of the research is based on data collected through interviews, photos, and observations.
The results showed that: (a) the participants regarded the workshop as an overall positive experience, (b) creativity is an excellent mean to promote and teach programming, and (c) a workshop approach raises interest in computer science among female students in particular.
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CSERC: Guided Exploration
In this paper / presentation the presenters introduced Guided Exploration as an inductive teaching approach. It is based on Minimalism and makes use of the pattern format. Guided Exploration addresses a couple of problems when teaching tool‐related concepts and techniques, like how to address different student learning styles and how to address the issue that most students do not read the provided material as expected before starting to work. It also puts the focus on the concepts to be learned.
Köppe and Rodin described the design of a first course at our university where we applied Guided Exploration. The evaluation gives promising results and shows that at least some of the known problems are addressed by the new approach.
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2013_CSERC_Koppe_ea_proceedings.pdf
CSERC: Visualization in CS Education
In this article / presentation, we proposed a two‐perspective visualization approach to show how the visualization power can be utilized in explaining some computer science concepts during the lecture. Mainly, explaining an abstract concept in theoretical computer science requires a lot of imagination of the entities relations in the underlying algorithm or in the underlying data flow. Lecturers need the help of some of visualization techniques in conveying these complex concepts. Our proposed approach helps lecturers in conveying abstract concepts in computer science through producing visual representations from either static perspective or dynamic perspective, depending on the nature of the concept. We suggest an algorithm for the designer to help them in deciding which perspective might be used to visualize the underlying concept.
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CSERC: Adult CS Learning
We discuss adult learning in the domain of information technology. Our focus is on adult distance learning, with examples for ICT design. We show how adult learning in this case differs from traditional school learning and how teaching goals may differ from learning goals. In order to develop generic understanding of how to design for adult learning we choose action research as technique for our empirical investigation and growing understanding. We show how practice allowed us to develop a view on providing and structuring learning resources, resulting in an attempt to develop design patterns for the various levels of structure that we identified.
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CSERC: Business Rule Language
Business rules are an important concept in today’s business operations. Students in a Business Management and IT curriculum must learn the basics of business rules by capturing and describing the declarative rules that apply in a restricted business context. Learning to specify rules in exact detail is hampered by the lack of rule languages suited for instructional purposes. Natural language or semi‐formal languages are too versatile and imprecise, whereas most formal languages presuppose advanced knowledge of mathematics and set theory. We described an essential language for denoting declarative business rules. The language provides only five basic statements which are closely matched to the architectural structure of declarative business rules. The expressive power of the language enables to capture rules very precisely. A tool can be built to depict the conceptual models of each rule, to generate a system prototype for editing data according to the rules and thus to test the rule workings, and to output functional specifications for subsequent system development. The clear and simple structure of the language is well suited to learning and understanding. Hence, it is expected that it will improve the learning curve of students in mastering the basics of declarative business rules.
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Keynote CSERC: Computational Creativity
Young people are surrounded by interactive media – but they engage with this media primarily as consumers, rather than as producers. In this talk, Brennan described how access to tools and access to community can support a shift from consumption to production, using the Scratch programming language as an extended case study. Based on interviews and observation, she shares five years of young people’s activities with Scratch, in both formal (K‐12 classroom environments) and informal (the Scratch online community) learning environments. Finally she ended by describing the future of Scratch, providing an overview of the latest version of the Scratch environment, Scratch 2.0.
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2013_CSERC_Brennan_proceedings.pdf
Digitale geletterdheid
De KNAW heeft een advies uitgebracht aan de ministers van OCW en EZ getiteld: ‘Digitale geletterdheid in het voortgezet onderwijs: vaardigheden en attitudes voor de 21e eeuw’. De huidige informaticavakken op havo en vwo schieten tekort qua inhoud, kwaliteit en positie en bereiden de leerlingen niet voor op de informatiemaatschappij. Het advies pleit voor een algehele herziening van het onderhavige gedeelte van het voortgezet onderwijs. In deze presentatie gaf professor Jan Karel Lenstra een samenvatting van het advies, aansluitend kon gereageerd worden.
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Arduino Netwerk
Aansluitend op de presentatie over ‘wireless remote sensing’‐technieken met behulp van de Arduino werd een workshop gegeven over de Arduino. Tijdens deze bijeenkomst konden de deelnemers zelf een remote network opbouwen en ervaren of de mogelijkheden ook door hen kunnen worden toegepast in hun ICT‐onderwijs.