Does Neurodidactics imply Revolution, Evolution, Enrichment, or Provocation of Established Pedagogical Theories?

Issues to be considered when teaching courses in Informatics

Abstract: This presentation will discuss questions like: „Why introduce neurodidactics?“ „Why now?“ „What will the consequences be?“ A synthesis between pedagogy, psychology, powerful computers, molecular biology and neuroscience has resulted in development of different scanning technologies, which are based on modern physics. This has led to a paradigmatic change from external observations of human behaviour to internal studies of information processing, in vivo, in the human brain. „Will next generation of curricula for education have an underpinning in neurodidactics?“ „Will neurodidactics change pedagogy from art to science?“

 Short-Bio: Aadu Ott is professor emeritus in Science and Technology Education at the University of Göteborg in Sweden. He is dozent in physics, but has mainly been active in the field of education, including compulsory schools and teacher training. He has during 30 years cooperated with Deutsches Museum in München with in service training of teachers in the History of Technology. He has also done research on neurodidactics using fMRI equipment and has had contact with ZNL, TransferCenter für Neurowissenschaft und lernen in Ulm. The last two years he has worked with the National Agency for Higher Education within a reform program for teacher education. He is now active in a program at Chalmers University of Technology which aims at creating a new kind of courses for students in technology. These students will, after five years of studies, receive a combination exam, including civil engineering and a teacher diploma.

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Visual Programming and Visualization of Programming

Abstract:
Learning programming is a difficult task and many students fail to complete introductory computer science courses. The talk will describe our research into two approaches to improve learning of programming.
Scratch is a visual programming environment intended for young people. They construct programs by dragging-and-dropping blocks labeled with commands and operations; the programs control the animation of sprites which provides a motivating context. We found that even middle-school students (age group 12-14) are capable of developing non-trivial software and, furthermore, they find it easier to learn professional programming languages when they reach secondary school. However, Scratch can cause students to develop bad programming habits that may be difficult to overcome and teachers must ensure that this doesn’t happen.
The other approach is to visualize the execution of programs written as text in professional programming languages. The Jeliot program animation system automatically generates detailed animations of programs written in the Java. Jeliot significantly facilitates learning because it provides a graphic display of the dynamic aspects of program execution that are hidden within the computer. An investigation into the use of Jeliot by secondary-school teachers showed a wide range of engagement, from full integration into the teaching practice to rejection caused by psychological factors.

Short CV:
Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari is a full professor in the Department of Science Teaching of the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he heads the computer science education group. He is the author of numerous textbooks, including Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Computation, and Mathematical Logic for Computer Science. His group, in collaboration with the University of Eastern Finland, developed the Jeliot program animation system. In 2004, he received the ACM/SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education, and in 2009 he was elected as a Distinguished Educator of the ACM.

 

 

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Teaching Concurrency and Nondeterminism with Spin

Abstract:
Spin is a model checker that is widely used for verification of concurrent and distributed systems. The talk will present techniques and tools for teaching concurrency and nondeterminism using Spin. Spin can replace concurrency simulators and can also generate scenarios that demonstrate errors like race conditions and starvation. The implementation of nondeterministic algorithms and finite automata in Spin will be described, together with the use of search diversity to demonstrate random algorithms and parallelism. The tools to be presented are: jSpin, a development environment for Spin; VMC, a tool that generates a diagram of the state space of a model; VN for visualizing nondeterminism; Erigone, a reimplementation of Spin designed for pedagogical use.

Short-Bio:
Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari is a full professor in the Department of Science Teaching of the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he heads the computer science education group. He is the author of numerous textbooks, including Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Computation, and Mathematical Logic for Computer Science. His group, in collaboration with the University of Eastern Finland, developed the Jeliot program animation system. In 2004, he received the ACM/SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education, and in 2009 he was elected as a Distinguished Educator of the ACM.

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Magische Informatik

Immer wieder begeistern Mentalisten mit Gedankenlese- und Vorhersagekunst­stücken ihr Publikum. Viele der hierbei gezeigten Kartentricks beruhen auf Prinzipien der Informatik oder lassen sich mit Hilfe von Methoden und Ver­fahren aus der Informatik hinsichtlich Ihrer Funktionsweise erläutern.

Im Workshop werden „Mentalisten-Kunststücke“ gezeigt, deren Hintergrund ver­schie­de­nen Bereichen der Informatik entstammt. Die Bandbreite erstreckt sich hierbei von Grundlagen des binären Zahlensystems, über Algorithmen und Be­weis­techniken bis hin zu Nachrichtenübermittlung und Software-Engineering. Die Teilnehmenden erhalten sowohl eine Erläuterung der Funktionsweise der Tricks als auch Hinweise zur effektvollen Aufführung. Jeder studiert während des Work­shops ein bis zwei Kartenkunststücke selbst ein und kann deren Aufführung auch gleich erproben. Zu allen einstudierten Tricks werden ausführlich die Hinter­gründe aus dem Bereich der Informatik erläutert. Die Teilnehmenden können sich even­tuell für sie noch neue informatische Sachverhalte aneignen sowie bekannte ver­tiefend einüben. Lehrenden werden Einsatzmöglichkeiten dieser Tricks für verschie­dene Themengebiete des Informatikunterrichts aufgezeigt

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