Overview of the Discipline of Computer Science - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 46

When a sufficient number of concepts are presented on the board, the
students are asked to suggest criterions according to which, in their opin-
ion, the concepts were categorized. Their answers should not be judged, and
they should be encouraged to suggest different ideas for the categorization
criterion.
Then, the students are asked to give titles to each set that are presented at
this stage on the board and to explain why they suggest the said title. Their
suggestions for titles should be listed as well. It is reasonable to assume that
at some stage the distinction between soft and rigid ideas will come up, even
if these specific terms will not be mentioned explicitly.
When no additional suggestions for titles are offered, the instructor reviews
the different titles/categorizations suggested by the students with some peda-
gogical comment. Then, it is declared that the lesson is dedicated to the teach-
ing of soft ideas, and the rationale for dealing with this topic is explained (as
previously described: computer science soft ideas are part of the discipline of
computer science, and it is not a trivial matter to teach them).
Activity 17: Computer Science Concept Classification, Teamwork 13
The students are asked to work in teams on the worksheet presented in
Table 3.6 .
After the students work on this worksheet, a discussion takes place with
the whole class that aims to elicit the notion of soft ideas and its role in com-
puter science and in computer science education.
Additional classification activities are presented in this guide with respect
to control structures (in Chap. 7) and with respect to recursion (in Chap. 12).
Table 3.6 Worksheet—Computer science concept classification
Worksheet
The following list of computer science concepts is given (in an alphabetical order)
A formal language, Abstraction, Algorithm, Assignment, Branchingstatements, Class, Control
structures, Correctness, Data representation, Debugging, Efficiency, Generalization, Inheri-
tance, Input-Output instructions, Modularity, Object, Parameter, Procedure, Recursion, Sort-
ing, Stepwise refinement, System state, Tracing, Tree, Variable
Sort the above concepts into sets
Give a title to each set
To each set, add at least one concept that does not appear in the set
13 ﾩMigvan—Research and Development in Computer Science Education, The Department of
Education in Science and Technology, Technion Israel Institute of Technology.