Introduction—What Is this Guide About? - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 7

Furthermore, the teaching-learning processes in the course are cooperative in
nature. This idea is applied by letting students present different products to their
peers and learn from one another and from feedback they receive from their peers
and course instructor. Feedback can be given both orally and in writing. The prod-
ucts of the course participants can be shared for future use either in the course or in
the schoolwork.
It is recommended to accompany the course with a website that includes avail-
able resources throughout the school year. These resources include links to reposi-
tories of learning materials and to sites that offer enrichment on topics such as the
history of computer science, dictionaries of programming languages, information
on computer scientists, and so on. In addition, all contents presented during the
course lessons both by the instructor and by the students can become available
on the Web.
Chapter 2 further elaborates on the teaching methods employed in the course.

1.4 The Structure of the Guide to Teaching Computer Science

This section describes the structure of the guide and briefly presents each of its
chapters.

1.4.1 Guide Structure and Organization

As mentioned, this guide can be used as a textbook for the MTCS course as well
as a guide for computer science teaching in a variety of frameworks, organizations,
and levels of computer science education. To achieve this purpose, each chapter
presents:

• A pedagogical computer science aspect and includes its meaning and importance
in the context of computer science education, its basic pedagogical principles,
and how it can be applied in computer science education in general and in the
MTCS course in particular.
• Examples of activities that address the pedagogical aspect the chapter deals with.
The learning activities are presented in detail, in gray boxes, including pedagogi-
cal guidelines, to enable their immediate application. In order to make the mate-
rial applicable to all levels of computer science education, we do not indicate
explicitly the length of each activity; each teacher/instructor, we suggest, allocate
the time framework for each activity according to the characteristics of his or her
learners. We also include an Index of Activities at the beginning of the guide.

We highlight that:

• The guide does not teach computer science; rather, it focuses on computer sci-
ence teaching .