Overview of the Discipline of Computer Science - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 26

be requested to limit the explanation to one or two sentences. From a peda-
gogical perspective, since the need to formulate such a brief definition for
a concept like computer science requires deep understanding of the said
topic, it is assumed that such a task fosters students' thinking about the
essence of computer science.
• Stage B: Class discussion
The explanations proposed by the students are presented in the class. For
each description, it is discussed what aspects of the field it highlights.
Another option is to gather the definitions and to ask the students to cat-
egorize them according to some criterion. See Chap. 7 for additional infor-
mation about classification tasks.
• Stage C: Internet exploration of computer science definitions
Students are asked to explore (mainly by the Internet) different definitions
for computer science as well as disagreements related to the nature of the
field.
• Stage D: Summary and class discussion (can be carried out whether Stage
C takes place or not)
The instructor, together with the students, summarizes the different per-
spectives of computer science, presented so far in the lesson. In this sum-
mary, it is important to emphasize that:
− Computer science deals with what is computable and with the charac-
terization of these computations.
− Computer science is a multifaceted field and is inspired by mathemat-
ics, science, and engineering.
− Computer science has many subfields and has interconnections to other
disciplines, such as biology, economics, medicine, and entertainment.
− The name of the discipline is misleading, and sometimes there is a ten-
dency to confuse it with computer applications.
The above characteristics of the field of computer science set special chal-
lenges for computer science educators. With this respect, several questions
can be asked and discussed in the MTCS course:
− Should the teaching of computer science be different from the teaching
of math, science, engineering, and art? If yes—how; if not—why?
− Taking into consideration the above characteristics of computer science:
- Is it important at all to teach computer science in the high school?
- How should the first lesson in a high school computer science class
be planned?
• Stage E: Review the Computing Curricula, homework
Review the 3 computer science volume of the series, developed by The
Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula of the IEEE Computer Society
and the Association 2 for Computing Machinery, published in 2001, 2008,
and 2013. 2
2 See 2001: http://www.acm.org/education/curric_vols/cc2001.pdf