Gamifying programming education in K-12: A review of programming curricula in seven countries and programming games

An increasing number of countries have recently included programming education in their curricula. Similarly, utilizing programming concepts in gameplay has become popular in the videogame industry. Although many games have been developed for learning to program, their variety and their correspondence to national curricula remain an uncharted territory. Consequently, this paper has three objectives. Firstly, an investigation on the guidelines on programming education in K-12 in seven countries was performed by collecting curricula and other relevant data official from governmental and non-profit educational websites. Secondly, a review of existing acquirable games that utilize programming topics in their gameplay was conducted by searching popular game stores. Lastly, we compared the curricula and made suggestions as to which age group the identified games would be suitable. The results of this study can be useful to educators and curriculum designers who wish to gamify programming education.     

Using lay volunteers to represent children in child protection court proceedings

Despite a widespread conviction that children ought to be independently represented in child protection court proceedings in the United States, there is little consensus as to what the role of that independent child advocate ought to be or, indeed, who should fulfill that role. This study accomplished three purposes: articulated an aggressive, ambitious and continuous role for the child's representative which encompassed a broad range of the child's interests, both legal and nonlegal; provided training in this role to demonstration groups of attorneys, law students and lay volunteers; and compared the effectiveness of each of the three demonstration groups in representing children to one another and to a control group of attorneys who received no special training from the research team. The findings indicate that carefully selected and trained lay people representing children in child abuse and neglect legal proceedings under lawyer supervision performed similarly to trained lawyers and law students in the way they approached their duties and in case outcomes achieved and significantly different from attorneys who, consistent with the practice in nearly all the United States, received no special training in child advocacy.     

Educational practice,student experience,and the purpose of education—a critique of ‘Pedagogy in Practice’

The focus of the present paper is a critical discussion of the recently developed concept Pedagogy in Practice (PiP) with the intention of improving the concept for future research. PiP aims to understand ongoing educational practice from the students’ perspective by interviewing groups of students about their understanding of learning. By emphasising ‘pedagogy’ and ‘practice’ and drawing from a theoretical foundation that takes practice and action as key concepts, PiP is an appealing alternative to research in student voice, to which it is closely related. However, a critical analysis of PiP in relation to its stated theoretical sources (Bourdieu, Bernstein, Dewey) shows that the approach contradicts these sources in key areas. In PiP students’ understanding of learning is taken as basic for improving educational practice, however, PiP is developed without an explicit notion of what education is for. This paper introduces a specific formulation of the purpose and functions of education based on the work of Gert Biesta, and outlines how a revised version of PiP might contribute to future empirical research in education.     

Nature watch

In our previous article ‘On observing the night sky’¹ we had introduced the reader to the stars and constellations and suggested how they may be observed. In this article we will provide a few technical details, which we had deliberately left out earlier and also introduce the reader to a number of the other remarkable objects that may be seen in the sky.     

Families as Educators for Global Citizenship: Five conundrums of intentional socialization

An international multidisciplinary Symposium on ‘Families as Educators for Global Citizenship’ was held in Budapest in December 1994, jointly convened by the Institute of Family & Environmental Research (London) and the Hungarian Sociological Association.

We based our work on two propositions: first, that families everywhere socialize their offspring for the norms and behaviour valued in their social systems; and second, that there are major changes going on a ‘global’ scale which are relevant to current socialization practices. We asked how changes in global culture and values impact on families and how families are responding. In the light of the importance of these questions and the sparseness of reliable answers, we suggest the need for research on families and the teaching/learning of social values: 1. How do families actually teach values: how much of it is intentional instruction, how much inadvertent teaching, as in association with language teaching and non‐intentional modelling ?

2. How do families reconcile their local traditional values with those emerging as part of global culture (i.e. the humanistic values of universal human rights, gender equity, respect for the environment, non‐violent conflict resolution and diversity).

3. How are personal identities formed which incorporate a global dimension, and how are conflicts in multiple identities (local, national, regional global) managed?

It is recognized that at present it is probably a minority interest to undertake intentional socialization for global values. However, we suggest that it will be increasingly recognized as important. For families seeking to instill such values, a number of conundrums are apparent. We have identified five for preliminary analysis.

     

Administrators' ratings of competencies needed to prepare preservice teachers for oral deaf education programs

Deaf education teacher preparation programs must prepare teachers to staff an increasing number of oral programs. A survey was conducted to determine which competencies administrators of deaf education programs rate as important for teachers in oral programs and to compare ratings of these competencies by oral school administrators to ratings made by administrators of comprehensive deaf and hard of hearing programs. Between the two groups of administrators, six areas of agreement about competencies were found. There were notable differences in the range of ratings between the two groups. These differences were attributed to the roles teachers assume in the two types of programs and the focus of instruction in each type of program.