Discovery learning of object-oriented modelling with exploration modules in secondary Informatics education

Discovery learning is very desirable not only in secondary education, because it prepares learners for life-long learning. Within secondary Informatics education in Germany, pupils often acquire many concepts by learning to program. To be able to model, to design and to evaluate own solutions, learners must acquire many details of a programming language and apply complex software development environments. So a lot of time gets lost for important topics, like the working principles of Informatics systems. The research presented here focuses on learning by exploration instead. The basic idea is that before developing own (typically small) solutions, learners explore medium size solutions by means of special learner-adequate Informatics systems, named exploration modules (EMs) here. In this paper, the author presents important aspects of the development methodology of such software, its application to the educational field of object-oriented modelling and shows how EM prototypes have successfully been included in different learning scenarios of secondary Informatics education, Informatics teacher education, and in-service Informatics teacher training within the academic years 2001 to 2004.