Search

A unique project was conducted with leading high school computer science (CS) teachers with no previous experience in academic writing. The idea was to support such teachers and help them prepare and submit a paper or poster to an academic conference as a soft introduction to the academic world.

In this poster, we describe a four years experience of summer seminars for high-school computer-science (CS) leading teachers in Israel. The seminars featured encounters between CS researchers and teachers, as well as pedagogy based activities.

This paper reports a research into the performance of high school students while they were first exposed to the paradigm of functional programming. The findings have been organized using three categories. In this paper we will concentrate on the "Automated assignment to parameters" conception which was the most widespread conception found in the research. We will describe the conception and will discuss some possible factors that could influence its development.

This article focuses on the practicum, one of the more important parts of computer science teacher preparation. During this stage, the prospective teachers practice the teaching of computer science in a high school setting before becoming actual computer science teachers. The practicum is highlighted in this article from three angles: the prospective teacher's perspective, the MTCS course perspective and the university mentor's perspective. For each perspective we illustrate the importance of the practicum by explaining how it bridges a specific gap. These gaps are illustrated by two examples that focus on content and pedagogical aspects of computer science education.

This paper reports a study in which 11th grade students were observed, while engaged in several learning activities that address general aspects of recursion. One of these learning activities focused on the creation of recursive descriptions using natural language. The class discourse was recorded and analyzed, in order to locate patterns of students' expressions and ways of thinking. The present finding is two-fold. On the one hand, a class genre was created and used to refer to recursive phenomena and to describe them verbally. On the other hand, although they used a shared set of some agreed-upon terms, the students tended to individually construct their unique recursive descriptions. These individual methods of assembly are labeled hereafter as "private syntax". It is concluded that learners' and educators' awareness of both the "building blocks" of any recursive description and the several possibilities for assembling these blocks, might help in the process of understanding recursion in general and in further construction of recursive functions in particular.