Lab-Based Teaching - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 154

Activity 70: Summary Work
As a summary of the topic of visualization and animation, the students can be
asked to work on the following summarizing activity which integrates several
aspects of the previous activities. Specifically, the students are asked to sum-
marize all the usages of visualization and animation with which they have
become familiar so far: software visualization, algorithm animation, visual-
ization-based IDEs and the media computation approach. They can be offered
to address the following topics. It is recommended to guide them to base their
work on the research available on visualizations and animation in the context
of computer science education (see Chap. 4).

• Differences and similarities between the different kinds of visualization
and animation.
• The pedagogical purpose(s) for which each kind of visualization and ani-
mation fits.
• Types of tasks that can be given with each kind of visualization and anima-
tion tool.
• Connections between the lab-first approach and each of these applications
of visualization and animation.
• Reflective essay of their future use of each application in their computer
science teaching in the high school.

8.5 Using the Internet in the Teaching of Computer Science

The Internet is an inseparable learning environment in the teaching of any subject.
In addition to the general arguments for integrating the Internet in learning and
teaching processes, in computer science education it gets special attention since the
Web by itself is largely based on computer science ideas, such as data compression,
encoding, search algorithms, and data mining. Therefore, the students, as future
computer science teachers, should be familiar with this environment as a learning
environment in general, and with some computer science ideas that are implement-
ed by the Web, in particular.
The Internet enables a constructivist-based learning environment in which learners
are active. In this chapter, we have seen so far one use of the Internet for the learning
of computer science in the context of algorithm animations. Activities 71-73 focus
on the following ways which use the Internet for the learning of computer science:

• Information gathering
• Exploration of the Internet through the computer science lens
• Distance learning