Computer Science Methods

Winter 2013Dr. R. Redekopp

CS Methods

Who are you? Name and some background. How much CS do you know: major/minor, languages, work experience? How about multimedia programs?Write this down and hand it in now please.

What do you know about teaching CS: have you taught any CS, observed a CS classroom, remember anything interesting about your high school CS ?

CS Methods

Course Outline and assignments •since this is a small class we can negotiate the types of assignments. If you have a better suggestion for your effort and time, let's talk about it•you must set the deadlines for your own assignments. Look at your overall schedule and figure out when you want to hand in each assignment. You may NOT hand in everything in the last week!•Three school visits - can we do some Mondays and trade class time?

Curriculum Questions

     - what are the implications of that for teaching your class?    - what do you want them to learn?     - does that effect what language you will use?    - does that mean you should lower your standards/expectations? 

How many of your students will go on to take CS in university or college?

Curriculum Questions

 

Should your students be ‘nicer’ than you were? Did you fool around?

Curriculum Questions

CS in Middle School    - do you agree that this is CS?    - should CS be mandatory?

CS Fairy Tale - the story of Ifs     - other fairy tales for CS by Shannon Duvall

Using Scratch to teach CS - John Maloney     - is this just 'watering down' the CS course or is it the way to interest students in CS?    - why would you NOT use this?

 

Some podcasts:

Curriculum Questions

Course Theme - This is not just another math course!

 CS language skills / social skills / problem solving skills

 

Curriculum Questions

What are different ways of getting them used to code?

-         Give code with blanks to fill in

                -    Give code with simple errors                       -    Use templates that they can adapt

- No code (just logic) - just click and drag

Curriculum Questions

Download the High School Curriculum Document for Computer Science: http://www.edu.gov.mb.ca/k12/cur/cs/index.html

Curriculum Questions

Flowchart online freehttp://www.gliffy.com/

Curriculum Questions

For next class - look at

- Ten Golden Rules for Teaching Computer Science    www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/talks/cse-97/cse-97.pdf        (great ideas, but what are the problems?)

Links on my netvibes.com/rredekopp page to some sample blogs/wikis of previous students. Click on the CS methods tab.

- also check out the CS Teacher blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/default.aspx- and check the CSTA blog - http://blog.acm.org/csta/