Learning to Develop Learning and Teaching of CS: A Collaborative Example (original) (raw)
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2015 International Conference on Learning and Teaching in Computing and Engineering, 2015
In this special session we meet a set of projects in computer science and engineering education at a university in Saudi Arabia. They are the product of a pedagogical development course ran in collaboration with a Swedish university during the academic year 2013/2014. The projects reflect the local situation, with its possibilities and challenges, and suggest steps to take, in the local environment, to enhance education. As such it is a unique document that brings insights from computer science and engineering education into the international literature.
Describing Computer Science Education Research: An Academic
Changing conditions in universities include using new teaching models, and new technologies. The integration of new technology into computer science (CS) and Information Technology (IT) education programmes is often accompanied by studies which aim to understand and improve the teaching and learning process. How we evaluate the potential of emerging technologies and integrate them into teacher education has clearly become increasingly important.
2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)
This paper explores the attitudes of Computer Science (CS) teachers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) who are confronted by the Saudi Teaching Competencies Standards (STCS). The STCS is a response to a substantial need to develop both subject-specific pedagogical ability as well as teachers subject area knowledge. The Ministry of Education in the KSA is encouraging teachers to improve their practices to achieve the new quality requirements for education. This paper presents the results of an investigation of CS teachers' views on educational belief changes in the KSA schools. The paper addresses how and why CS teachers adopt new educational beliefs in their teaching. The paper presents the results of the investigation of the CS teachers views on educational belief changes in the KSA schools and the STCS policy document guidelines. Research in the area of changing educational epistemology in teaching CS identifies six factors that influence teachers, these are personal pedagogical beliefs, peer learning, curriculum, self-directed learning, student feedback and the STCS. A mixed method study approach was adopted in this work. Content analysis has been applied to the interview transcript and thematic coding analysis to the government policy document (STCS). The results provide a valuable case study in the KSA and emphasize the weak relationship between educational epistemology change and the STCS norms. The findings show that the STCS should provide stronger guidance for CS teachers to keep changing beliefs in teaching CS. The STCS should offer supporting official resources to CS teachers to help them in changing their beliefs in regard to teaching CS.
This paper focuses on the approaches used by Computer Science (CS) teachers to teach CS concepts at the higher level of secondary education and especially in Grades 10-12. It is based on a case study where twenty five CS teachers in Greece were observed teaching CS concepts in the classroom. The focus of the observation was on a variety of specific teacher interventions such as: a) how students’ previous knowledge was investigated and how this knowledge was connected with the new learning concepts in focus, b) the kind of activities proposed by the teacher, c) the kind of communication taking place, d) how the students’ mistakes were handled, e) how many students were involved in each lesson, f) the kind of motivation used to involve students in each specific teaching session, g) the learning media used and h) summary and abstraction of the main learning aspects of each lesson. Based on these data, 7 specific CS teaching profiles were formed.
Proceedings of the twenty-seventh SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education - SIGCSE '96, 1996
BRACE Yourself: CS Education Research Is Coming
2004
Computer science education is a fledgling research discipline. Only recently have CS educators begun to explore important issues and methodologies in computer science teaching. However, without a mature research community or a common theoretical model, it can be difficult to develop a coherent research program. Efforts are duplicated between institutions, projects become mired in methodological problems and experimental rigour is sacrificed. In an effort to combat these problems, Sally Fincher (University of Kent) and Dr Marian Petre (Open University) have developed a method for fostering coordinated research efforts between CS educators from different universities. A group of interested CS educators from various institutions participate in a methodology workshop, followed by a year-long research project where each participant gathers data from his or her own institution, and a second combined workshop for data interpretation and preparation of a research report. The Australasian instantiation of this approach is titled BRACE: Building Research in Australasian Computing Education. The BRACE project currently involves CS Educators from 15 tertiary institutions in New Zealand, Australia and the UK in a study of the determinants of early programming skill. This paper describes Fincher and Petre's methodology, the content of the current BRACE project, and the group's goals for the future.
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This paper describes and enacts a process for bootstrapping a more systematic discussion of computing education within a school of computing at a researchintensive Australasian university. Thus far, the project has gone through three stages. In the first stage, some academics were interviewed about their approach to teaching. In the second stage, selected anonymous quotes from the interviews were presented and discussed by other interested members of the school at workshops. In the final stage, selected anonymous quotes from the interviews and workshops were placed on a web-based survey, to which interested members of the school responded. These forms of data will be used to drive further stages of debate within the school. The theoretical underpinnings of this project are Wenger's concept of a community of practice, phenomenography, and socially constructivism. The aim is not to instruct the academics in any "right way" to teach. Instead, the aim is to facilitate debate, where the teachers identify the problems, and in finding the solutions they construct their own "pedagogic reality". As facilitators of this process, the authors of this paper highlighted dialectically opposed views in quotes from the teachers, and then allow the teachers to synthesise those views into a more sophisticated view. Our ultimate project aim is to grow a teaching community that balances reified theories of teaching and learning with participation in a community of practice.
Computer Science Teachers as Amateurs, Students and Researchers
Proceedings of the 5th Baltic Sea Conference on Computing Education Research.(Koli, Finland, 2005), 2005
Boyer coined the term" scholarship of teaching", but the term has become ambiguous. In this paper, I nominate my own three categorizations of university computing educators: amateurs, students, and researchers. Amateurs may be excellent with students, but they do not routinely engage in dialog with other teachers about teaching. Students embrace the general theories of education, and write papers about how they have reconstructed their teaching in accordance with those theories. Researchers are engaged ...
Supporting Computing Educators to Create a Cycle of Teaching and Computing Education Research
United Kingdom and Ireland Computing Education Research conference., 2021
Despite a rich history of computing education in the United Kingdom and Ireland, computing educators often rely on the same procedures and teaching practices rather than embrace innovations. Similarly, while a growing collection of literature exists on educational theory and practice in computing education, much of this focuses on the same concepts and concerns. An aspiration is that both these problems can be simultaneously addressed by computing educators adopting a cycle of embracing existing literature when devising teaching practice and then feeding their experience and findings back to the community in a rigorous fashion. Consequently, this panel supports computing educators by acting as advisers on a one-on-one basis to support audience members in discovering or devising their own cycle of teaching practice and computing education research.