Getting Experience in Computer Science Education - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 239

Third, each visit in a high school is also a rich source for new material to be ad-
dressed in the MTCS course. Therefore, the university mentor should increase his or
her awareness to events, scenarios, interaction styles, and typical behaviors that can
be brought back to the MTCS course, and by doing so closes also the gap between
theory and reality mentioned above.
Finally, for the success of the practicum process, it is important that the in-school
mentor and the university mentor have direct communication channel and good
relationship. The university mentor's visits in the school can support building such
relationships.
Activities 106-108 should be facilitated in the MTCS course just before the stu-
dents start their practicum. They are based on the analysis of real scenario descrip-
tions, taken from the practicum of prospective CS teachers in the high school.
It is recommended, however, that the instructor of the MTCS course brings au-
thentic examples from lessons he or she observed as a university mentor while
mentoring prospective CS teachers in their practicum.
Activity 106: Bridging Gaps Related to the Content Aspect of Computer
Science Education
• Stage A: Scenario description 3
The students are presented with the following scenario, in which Anna, a
prospective CS teacher, was asked by her in-school mentor to prepare a 2 h
lesson about procedures to a 11th grade students, who learned CS in the pro-
cedural programming paradigm. In a meeting with her university mentor that
took place prior to the lesson Anna said:
Maya (Anna's in-school mentor) asked me to prepare a lesson about proce-
dures. It will be the first time that this class learns procedures. I thought about
it a lot at home and it seems to me that I don't have what to teach with respect
to this topic to fill 2 h. It is a simple topic and it is sufficient to give them [the
pupils] the syntax of how to write procedures. Even if I present many exam-
ples, I will not have what to do for the entire period of time. So, I thought that
during the second hour I would start to teach them about types of parameters.
Anna was encouraged by the university mentor to explain what it means
“to know (or to understand) procedures,” that is, what procedures literacy is
according to her understanding.
In the MTCS, it is recommended that the instructor stops and asks the stu-
dents how they define “procedures literacy.”
Anna listed the following issues:
3 Based on Lapidot ( 2005 ).