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This chapter focuses on computer science teaching methods that fit especially to be employed in the computer lab. The uniqueness of the computer lab as a learning environment for computer science is explained by the fact that it enables learners to explore their problem solving strategies, to express their solutions to a given problem, to get feedback regarding to the correctness of their solution and to reflect on it, to develop large projects, to explore new topics, and to deepen their understanding of the nature of the algorithms they develop. The aim of the lessons in the MTCS course that are dedicated to this topic is to expose the students to usages of the computer lab as a learning environment and to let them realize how it may improve their future pupils’ understanding of computer science ideas. One of the main messages of this chapter is that the learning of computer science in the computer lab is not limited to programming tasks; rather, the computer lab can be used in additional pedagogical ways that further enhance learners’ understanding of computer science. Specifically, the following topics are addressed in this chapter: what is a computer lab?, the lab-first teaching approach, visualization and animation, and using the Internet in the teaching of computer science.

This chapter* presents an active-learning-based teaching model for implementation in the MTCS course, which is based on the constructivist approach. This model is used in this Guide in most of the offered activities. The chapter starts with the motivation and the rationale for using active learning in the MTCS course; then, the active-learning-based teaching model is introduced and explained, including a description of the role of the instructor of the MTCS course in the model implementation.

This chapter proposes how to address computer science soft concepts and skills in the MTCS course. These topics are especially important today as they are dominant in the teaching of computer science in schools and the academia, as well as influence software development processes in the industry. These facts require from computer science students and teachers, computer scientists, and software engineers to acquire, in addition to disciplinary and technical knowledge, additional skills: both social (such as teamwork and getting and giving feedback), cognitive (e.g., thinking in terms of different levels of abstraction), and organizational (e.g., familiarity with different kinds of organizations). This chapter is divided into two parts: computer science soft concepts (Sect. 5.2) and computer science soft skills (Sect. 5.3). For each topic, its meaning and its importance and relevance in the context of computer science education are explained, and then, activities which deal with the said topic are presented.

This chapter focuses on teaching and learning of data science. We address this topic in this Guide of teaching computer science since data science is an emerging discipline that computer science is one of its basic components and, accordingly, the two fields have some overlaps. In this chapter we take into consideration the fact that not all the students, who study the MTCS course, are familiar with data science, and, therefore, unlike other chapters, this chapter does include some explanations about what data science is as well as its knowledge structure. We dedicate special attention to the pedagogy of data science, highlighting both the learners’ perspective and the teachers’ perspective. To avoid too abstract and vague description of the teaching and learning processes of data science in high school, we present an example of a data science program for high school. In the activities presented to the students in this chapter, we aim to highlight the opportunities that the teaching of data science opens to the students, as data science is an emerging field that its pedagogy is still in its initial development stages. At the same time, the activities highlight the relevance of data science to the teaching of computer science in order to deliver the message that the teaching processes of the two fields can mutually contribute to each other.

This article describes a unique Israeli-Russian project, in which Israeli high school computer science (CS) teachers promote curricular reform in the Russian region of Penza, based on the Israeli high school CS curriculum. The reform involves local schools, universities, the hi-tech industry and local government officials. It includes changes in courses, textbooks and other teaching materials. The Israeli teachers provided workshops to assist the Russian teachers in the assimilation of the reform. This collaboration may encourage other countries to collaborate and not necessarily re-invent the wheel; for some countries it can serve as a catalyst to assist in bringing computer science education into schools.

This paper presents the "Mind the Gap" initiative that aims to encourage female high school pupils to study computer science (CS) in high school. This is achieved by increasing their awareness to what CS is, and exposing them to the essence of a hi-tech environment and to same gender role models. Female software engineers at Google's Israel R&D Center in collaboration with the Israeli National Center undertook the initiative for computer science teachers. We describe the initiative and its impact on the female pupils' interest in CS. One of our conclusions is that even a short visit to a hi-tech company, in this case - Google, has the potential to change pupils' perception of what CS is and to increase their interest in CS and their desire to study it. One could easily adapt this initiative to other companies and scale it to infl uence a rather large population.

This article suggests a song debugging activity that brings together two key ideas - the analogy between learning and debugging and the pedagogical potential of music in Computer Science Education (CSE). The paper can be viewed as the fourth in a series of papers published in inroads about the course Methods of Teaching Computer Science in the High School, but it can also stand on its own merit, since it discusses issues that are relevant to CSE in general.

This article continues our previous manuscript, published in the December 2003 issue of inroads. Both articles address the "Methods of Teaching Computer Science in the High School" course (hence forth abbreviated MTCS). In this article we present an active learning based teaching model that can support the construction of the prospective computer science teacher's professional perception as a future computer science teacher.

This article focuses on a "Methods of Teaching Computer Science in the High School" course (abbreviated MTCS). It presents the rationale and need for the course, and suggests optional course frameworks and implementations that are not limited to a particular programming language, programming paradigm, level of students, or curriculum.

This chapter puts the MTCS course in the wider context of computer science teacher preparation programs. It first describes a model for high school computer science education model or high school computer science education that one of its components is computer science teacher preparation programs. The model consists of five key elements – a well-defined curriculum, a requirement of a mandatory formal computer science teaching license, teacher preparation programs, national center for computer science teachers, and research in computer science education – as well as interconnections between these elements. Then, the focus is placed on the teacher preparation programs component of the model, describing a workshop targeted at computer scientists and computer science curriculum developers who wish to launch computer science teacher preparation programs at their universities but lack knowledge about the actual construction of such programs.

This chapter presents an optional organization theme for the Methods of Teaching Computer Science (MTCS) course around the concept of recursion. Based on the active learning-based teaching model, a series of themes is suggested, each one highlights a different pedagogical perspective. The themes are: classification of recursive phenomena (a nonprogramming task), the “leap of faith” approach, models of the recursive process, research on learning/teaching recursion, how does recursion sound? (the case of trees and fractals), evaluation (a nonprogramming project and a test construction), and a list of additional activities that illustrates that recursion can, indeed, be the focus of almost any topic discussed in the MTCS course. Each theme is accompanied with activities devoted to recursion to be facilitated in the MTCS course.

This chapter focuses on learners’ alternative conceptions. Since prospective teachers in general, and prospective computer science teachers in particular, face difficulties in gaining the notion of alternative conceptions, it is important to address this issue in the MTCS course and to deliver the message that a learning opportunity exists in each pupils’ mistake (or misunderstanding). Several pedagogical tools for exposing learners’ alternative conceptions are presented as well as three activities to be facilitated in the MTCS course.

This chapter proposes how to address in the MTCS course topics associated with the nature of the discipline of computer science and with cross-curriculum topics. The importance of these topics is explained by the fact that even today no consensus has been reached with respect to one agreed-upon definition for computer science, and different scholars view it differently. Specifically, the following topics are discussed in this chapter: what is computer science, the history of computer science, computer scientists, social issues of computer science, programming paradigms, and computer science soft ideas. For each topic, its meaning and its importance and relevance in the context of computer science education are explained, and then, several activities which deal with the said topic are presented.

In this paper, we describe a six years experience of summer seminars for high-school computer-science (CS) leading teachers in Israel. The seminars, called "On the frontier of computer science", featured encounters between CS researchers and teachers, as well as pedagogy discussions and workshops. The result of these innovative seminars is that they helped strengthen the local leading teachers' community above and beyond expectations.

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.

This chapter describes how to design a Methods of Teaching Computer Science (MTCS) course within an academic computer science teacher preparation program, and suggests two possible syllabi for such a course. It is emphasized, however, that different approaches and frameworks can be applied when one designs the course. In the first section of this chapter, we propose four possible perspectives on the MTCS course: the NCATE standards, merging computer science with pedagogy, Shulman’s model of teachers’ knowledge, and research findings. The second section of the chapter describes two MTCS course syllabi. We mention that though the focus in this section is placed on the MTCS course, the course models, as well as parts of them, can be used also for other purposes related to computer science teaching, such as curriculum design and professional development of computer science teachers.

This chapter deals with the first teaching experiences that the students enrolled in the MTCS course gain before becoming computer science teachers. It presents two frameworks in which the prospective computer science teachers gain this first teaching experience: The practicum, which takes place in high school, after one or two semesters of learning the MTCS course, and a tutoring framework that can be integrated in the MTCS course. We also present activities that can be facilitated in the MTCS course, in which the students deal with and analyze teaching scenarios taken from the practicum of other prospective computer science teachers.

As in the teaching of any discipline, computer science teachers are expected to vary their teaching methods, and therefore this pedagogical issue should be included in the MTCS course. This chapter focuses on how to achieve this pedagogical target by using different types of questions. It explores and discusses different types of questions that computer science educators (middle and high school teachers as well as university instructors) can use in different teaching situations and processes: in the classroom, in the computer lab, as homework, or in tests. The chapter lays out also the advantages of using a variety of question types both for learners and teachers, and focuses on the design process of different question types. Though the types of questions presented are mainly related to programming assignments, most of them are suitable also for other computer science contents.

This chapter presents active-learning-based teaching methods that computer science educators can employ in the classroom. The purpose of this chapter is first, to let the students in the MTCS course experience a variety of teaching methods before becoming computer science teachers; second, to discuss, together with the students, the advantages and disadvantages of these teaching methods; and third, to demonstrate high school teaching situations in which it is appropriate to employ these teaching methods. Within this chapter we discuss (a) pedagogical tools: games, the CS-Unplugged approach, rich tasks, concept maps, classification, and metaphors; (b) different forms of class organization; and (c) mentoring software project development.

The Introduction presents the motivation for writing this Guide, the Methods of Teaching Computer Science (MTCS) course for which the Guide can serve as a textbook, the structure of the Guide, and how it can be used in different frameworks of computer science education.

Problem solving is one of the central activities performed by computer scientists as well as computer science learners. However, computer science learners often face difficulties in problem analysis and solution construction. Therefore, it is important that computer science educators be aware of these difficulties and acquire appropriate pedagogical tools to help their learners gain experience in these skills. This chapter is dedicated to these pedagogical tools. It presents several problem-solving strategies to address in the MTCS course together with appropriate activities to mediate them to the prospective computer science teachers.