Overview of the Discipline of Computer Science - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 47

Activity 18: Design of Tasks and Questions About Soft Ideas
The students are asked to design an activity that deals with soft ideas. Two
options are suggested: the first asks to construct a question that demonstrates
one soft idea to computer science learners; the second asks to construct a
question to be included in a test that checks students' understanding of one
soft idea. In most cases, it is sufficient to facilitate one of these options.
Option 1: Construction of an activity that demonstrates a soft idea, work
in pairs
The following task is presented to the students:
• Select one of the soft ideas presented on the board (if the first trigger was
facilitated) or in the worksheet presented in Table 3.6 (if the second trigger
was facilitated).
• Develop a task/question to be presented to high school computer science
pupils that illustrates this soft idea.
• Explain why you selected this soft idea and what guidelines you followed
when constructing the task/question.
Option 2: Construction of a question to be included in a test that checks learn-
ers' understanding of one soft idea, team work
The following task is presented to the students:
• Select one of the soft ideas presented on the board (if the first trigger was
facilitated) or in the worksheet presented in Table 3.6 (if the second trigger
was facilitated).
• Develop a question to be included in a test that checks students' under-
standing of the said soft idea.
• Describe the guidelines you followed when developing the question and
formulate instructions how to check students' answer. Explain the guide-
lines you followed while formulating these instructions.
To further highlight the nature of computer science soft ideas, it is impor-
tant to discuss the students' suggestions for these questions (see also Chap. 9
about types of questions). Further, it is important to discuss whether it is pos-
sible at all to test learners' understanding of soft ideas. Indeed, it is difficult
to develop a test question that checks students' understanding of soft ideas.
Therefore, for this purpose, other evaluation methods should be included in
computer science education (see Chap. 10).
Activities 19-22 address computer science heuristics, such as top-down develop-
ment and successive refinement, focusing on the concept of abstraction. A similar
discussion, however, can be conducted with respect to other methodologies and
topics, such as operating systems or data abstraction. In addition, with respect to
other computer science soft ideas, it is important to note that ideas such as abstrac-
tion should not be addressed as isolated topics; rather, they should be addressed,
referred to, and highlighted at any appropriate opportunity. Still, since such topics
are complex in nature and are usually addressed in relation to other (sometimes