Teaching Methods in Computer Science Education - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 130

Activity 60: Scheduling the Mentoring Process of Software Project Development
• Stage A: Setting the framework
The instructor, together with the students, sketches a pedagogical environ-
ment in which a computer science teacher mentors a class of 20 pupils in
the development process of a software project. This sketch includes: the
development environment, the programming paradigm and programming
language, the project scope, the length of the development period, and the
grading policy.
• Stage B: Group work
The students are asked to build a schedule for the mentoring process of
the class they just sketched. For each period of time of the entire develop-
ment process, they are asked to indicate the main activities that the com-
puter science teacher and the pupils accomplish with respect to the project
development. They should also explain each of their pedagogical consid-
erations. This process can be repeated with respect to different periods of
time, for example, 1 school year, 3 months, etc.
• Stage C: Class discussion
Following the group work, the different options proposed by the groups
are presented, together with their pedagogical considerations. In this dis-
cussion, it is important to address several questions, such as:
− Should a computer science teacher teach first all the relevant material
and only then start guiding his or her pupils in the development pro-
cess? Or, alternatively, should the computer science teacher integrate
the project development process with the actual teaching of the com-
puter science material? What advantages and disadvantages does each
approach have?
− In what ways are the different-in-length schedules that the students sug-
gested similar? In what ways are they different?
− What factors did the students consider when building these schedules:
the development environment? The programming paradigm? The pro-
gramming language? Other factors? In what way?
− What aspects, beyond the actual teaching of computer science content,
should a computer science teacher pay attention to when mentoring
software project development?
• Stage D: Read a paper, homework
If the instructor of the MTCS course wishes to further deepen the students'
attention to managerial aspects of mentoring software projects in high
school computer science classes, the students can be asked to work on the
homework presented in Table 7.9 .