A refreshing approach to an academic seminar course

A Refreshing Approach to an Academic Seminar Course Noa Ragonis Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel Department of Computer Science Education, Beit Berl College, Israel noarag@beitberl.ac.il Activities are described in table 1. Products of individual and group activities had to be presented to the course plenum. All the students’ products are available at the course site. ABSTRACT This paper describes a creative approach for the computer science (CS) academic seminar course. The seminar goal is to gain integration between the curriculums learnt topics, thus clarifying and enriching CS students' conceptual maps. Table 1. The different activities of the course Type CATEGORIES AND SUBJECT DESCRIPTORS K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Information Science Education – Computer science education, Curriculum GENERAL TERMS Individual Management, Theory 1. INTRODUCTION The Academic Seminar Course (ASC) usually takes place in the last year of studies. The course which I conduct takes place at Beit-Berl College which awards an academic degree in CS teaching (B.Ed). The main preliminary courses are: Procedural (Pascal, C), Logic (Prolog), Functional (Scheme) and Object Oriented (Java) Programming; Algorithms and Data Structures; Automata Theory. Students have learned a lot of advanced topics but my feeling is that they don’t have sufficient connections between them; therefore it’s hard to acquire the discipline significance. This issue is important especially for future teachers, who are expected to give their high school students (who learn much of the above topics) a clear, wide and appropriate picture about the CS discipline. Group Plenum Description 1. Choose a CS scientist and research relating to his: Year of birth, places of living, activities, innovations, contribution, and significance. 2. Choose a programming language related to each paradigm group, which hasn’t been studied before, and do a brief survey and demonstration of it. 3. Build a self-concept map as a semantic network. Research the chosen paradigm and relate to: years in which it arose, goals, background, its uniqueness, its usability, related programming languages. 1. Lectures by course teacher as base for discussion. In purpose to widen and refine students’ conceptual maps: e.g. sorting and recursion via different paradigms, concurrent programming. 2. Create three main products: description of the scientists’ activities on time axis, description of the paradigms and languages progression on time axis, and compose the self-concept maps. 4. SAMPLE OF OUTCOMES 2. COURSE GOALS The process of developing the course products is now in progress. To demonstrate part of the students’ new conceptual map I’ll use one of the chosen scientists - Alan Turing. In addition to getting to know him, his private history, and his contribution to CS, the discussion about him covered very important and different issues like: Turing Machine as the base of computational models and computer architecture; The Turing Test from AI point of view; The Turing Award (granted by the ACM – an additional new concept…) which two of the other chosen scientists achieved. I plan to continue to develop the course outline, and to conduct a research about students' conceptual changes during the sequence of activities. So far it seems that the students appreciate the innovation and the broad point of view that they've already gained. Students have reported that: “The inquiry activities were very useful, interesting and aroused curiosity”, “Before the course my knowledge was partial and unorganized”, "I gained new interpretations to most of the CS topics which I have learned before”. In my poster I’ll present some of the course products. The traditional two goals of ASC are: (1) Exposing students to advanced CS topics, that aren’t usually covered in the curriculum; (2) Directing students to deal with self-learning of an advanced topic and present it to the course plenum. My idea was to expand the course goals in order to enrich students’ knowledge of the CS discipline. In order to achieve it I split the course into two parts. The second part will follow the traditional goals, but the first part has a totally different intention which is designed to gain the following goals: (1) Acquire a broader perspective of some of the topics learnt; (2) Present different interrelations between different topics [2]; (3) Expose students to CS history, and to some of its outstanding scientists; (4) Enrich the students' activities by adding inquiry activities and collaborative learning [1]. 3. THE COURSE PART I OUTLINE The main goal is to compare and to discuss the differences between programming paradigms, and to enrich students’ conceptual map. Another area which has potential to broaden horizons is to introduce students to CS scientists. The course activities are divided into three main types: individuals, groups, and plenum. Each student is assigned to one of the paradigms groups: Procedural, Logic, Functional, and Object Oriented. 5. REFERENCES [1] Hanson, T. Wolfskill, J. Chem. (2000). Process Workshops - A New Model for Instruction. Journal of chemical education, 77(1), 120-129. [2] Saitoh, H., Tanaka, N., Ohno, T., Maeda, T., and Ohuchi, A. (2000). A collaborative learning support system for knowledge building using conceptual maps. Proceedings of ICEUT 2000, 50-57. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). ITICSE’04, June 28–30, 2004, Leeds, United Kingdom. ACM 1-58113-836-9/04/0006. 236