Lab-Based Teaching - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 140

approach reverses the traditional teaching order, by which a theoretical material is
presented first, following by its practicing and experimenting in the computer lab 2 .
The lab-first approach has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand,
in the spirit of constructivism, its main advantage is expressed by the active experi-
ence learners get in the computer lab, which in turn, establishes foundations based
on which learners construct their mental image of the said topic; on the other hand,
the lab-first teaching approach involves some insecurity feelings expressed both by
the computer science teacher and the learners.
One way to deliver this complex message to the students in the MTCS course is by
letting them experience the lab-first approach. Activity 63 was designed for this pur-
pose by guiding the students to explore the lab-first teaching approach both from the
learners' and the computer science teacher's perspectives. The worksheet presented
in this activity is only one option by which the lab-first approach can be implemented
in general and by which the conditional statement if can be introduced to novice
learners, in particular. For example, the worksheet can include more open tasks, such
as the following one: After Task 3, an intermediate summary of the general structure
of the if statement is presented. An open assignment would ask learners to explore
the extent of instruction for execution by themselves. In this spirit, the worksheet
would present the following instruction: So far, the only instruction used inside the if-
statement was System.out.println . Replace the System.out.println with different java
instructions and check which instructions can be nested in the if-statement .
If the instructor of the MTCS course wishes to let the students feel the learning
experience similar to their future high school pupils, it is recommended to use the
lab-first approach with one of the integrated development environments (IDEs) pre-
sented in Activity 67 (see Sect. 8.8.4) for which they are not familiar.
Activity 63: Pedagogical Exploration of the Lab-First Teaching Approach
• Stage A: First experience with the lab-first teaching approach, work in
pairs on the computer
The students are given the worksheet presented in Table 8.2 (Paz 2006 ).
They are told that high school computer science pupils had worked on
this worksheet before they learned the topic of conditional statements. The
students in the MTCS course are asked to:
1. Work on the activities presented in the worksheet.
2. Analyze the worksheet from a pedagogical perspective: What pedagogical
advantages does it have for the introduction of a new topic? What is the
purpose of each task presented in the worksheet? How does each task sup-
port learners' understanding of conditional statements?
2 In this sense, the lab-first approach is similar to the flipped classroom (see activity 56,
section 7.3).