Introduction—What Is this Guide About? - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 12

Table 1.1 Organization of the contents of the MTCS course
Computer science contents Variables Control

structures

Recursion … And so forth—additional

computer science topics

Pedagogical aspects
Learners' difficulties and
conceptions

+ +

Teaching methods in
computer science education

+

Lab-based teaching +

Evaluation +

…
And so forth—other
pedagogical aspects

dimensional table, such as Table 1.1 , in order to organize the course structure and
contents. The columns of the table represent the main contents and ideas of the high
school curriculum on which the MTCS course focuses; the table rows present the
pedagogical contents and ideas that the instructor wishes to address in the course.
Thus, the different chapters of this Guide represent, in fact, the table rows.
During the actual teaching of the MTCS course, the instructor decides what
pedagogical ideas to address with respect to what computer science topic(s). He
or she can choose, for example, to discuss the computer science topic of variables
with respect to the pedagogical aspects of evaluation and lab-based teaching; the
computer science topic of control structures—with respect to the pedagogical top-
ics of learners' difficulties and conceptions and teaching methods in computer sci-
ence education, etc. In this way, each activity in the course is associated with both
a computer science topic and a pedagogical aspect. It also implies that none of the
lessons of the MTCS course focuses solely on a computer science idea (without a
pedagogical context) or on a pedagogical idea (without connecting it to the teaching
of some computer science topic). In this spirit, though the pedagogical aspects pre-
sented in this guide are presented in most cases in the context of a specific computer
science topic, they can be easily adapted for the teaching of other computer science
topics. Section 10.5 addresses the evaluation of the students in the MTCS course
and outlines possible elements for students' evaluation in the course.
By the end of the course, such a table should not be full; it reflects, however,
whether all the computer science topics included in the curriculum have been dis-
cussed in the MTCS course and if all the pedagogical ideas the instructor wished
to highlight were indeed addressed. Nevertheless, it is recommended to address all
computer science topics and all the pedagogical aspects; the specific topic selection
and their presentation order in the course is left to the course instructor according to
his or her pedagogical preferences.