Social, ethical and technical issues in informatics—An integrated approach

This paper outlines a didactic approach for computer science courses based on the concept of socio-technical Informatics Systems, demonstrating the linkage between computational issues and their manifold social contexts as well as their close relation to social and ethical issues. The analysis of the product–process relationship of software development as a major element of the construction of Informatics Systems leads to the identification of important criteria for designing computer science courses. The selection of application areas as context types, of educational lenses, of methods and of media enables an integrated teaching approach. This kind of integrated approach offers an holistic approach to technical and societal aspects of an Informatics System in computer science education.     

Machine learning for human learners: opportunities,issues, tensions and threats

Educational technology research and development - Machine learning systems are infiltrating our lives and are beginning to become important in our education systems. This article, developed from a...     

Welfare families' use of early childhood care and education programs, and implications for their children's development

With recent legislation placing a strong emphasis on the transition of welfare mothers into the workforce, it becomes increasingly important to understand whether and how participation in early childhood care and education programs has implications for the development of children from welfare families. This study focused on a sample of 182 African-American families, all of whom had applied for or were receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children, and each with a child of between 3 and 5 years of age. We first examined which of a wide range of background characteristics predicted participation in early childhood care and education programs. We then examined whether measures of the children's school readiness and social maturity were predicted by current participation in an early childhood program, above and beyond the background characteristics associated with the use of such a program. Our results indicate that participation in an early childhood program is associated with significantly higher scores on the measure of school readiness.     

Thinking in Objects and their Collaboration: Introducing Object-Oriented Technology

Although many professionals in education believe that an ‘objects first’ approach is the best method of introducing object-oriented technology, there is no common agreement on how to start such courses. Current study programs often begin by teaching a chosen object-oriented programing language, where students are confronted by a large amount of syntactical detail. Instead of focusing on the basics of object-oriented technology, namely objects and their collaborations, difficulties in handling the details of the programing language lead to a very scattered knowledge of object-oriented concepts. This is dangerous, as learners are left with a set of unconnected knowledge fragments. Approaches which embed different knowledge fragments in an overall knowledge view are known as “cognitive apprenticeship” approaches. The main idea of cognitive apprenticeship is continuous practice. We present a learning environment for introducing object-oriented technology in upper secondary schools based on cognitive apprenticeship. We use a visual programing language to away from the details and provide tool support to aid practice. We present the learning sequencewhich is used and show the impacts it makes on the course structure in our experiment in the chosen object-oriented programming language The Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula IEEE Computer Society.