[alg-prog-l] How we teach intro CS is wrong

[Thiago Silva]

Mark Guzdial, professor da Georgia Institute of Technology escreveu
recentemente em seu blog sobre os problemas do ensino de introdução à
computação/programação:

Question Everything: How We Teach Intro CS is Wrong
http://computinged.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/question-everything-how-we-teach-intro-cs-is-wrong/

excertos do post:

"I’ve been interested in John Sweller and Cognitive Load Theory since
reading Ray Lister’s AACE keynote paper from a couple year’s back.
I’ve wanted to learn more, and as all professors will tell you, the
best way to learn something (or at least, to find time to learn it) is
to teach it. So, I assigned several papers on the topic (first three
papers in the References) to my educational technology class.  Those
three papers set me on a paper finding-and-reading spree which is
having a dramatic effect on how I think about we teach about
computing."

"[...] we should not be asking students to solve something new.  They
should practice the same information, demonstrate that they got that.
What KSC shows is that that approach takes too much time and leads to
too little learning — it overloads the cognitive ability of the
learner.  Only the very best students can succeed in when simply
thrown in front of a speeding interpreter or compiler.  (I think that
explains the “two humps” pretty darn well — it’s not the discipline,
but how we teach it that results in the bimodal distribution.)"

"Finally, it turns out that textbooks are not the best medium for
teaching programming.  The Atkinson, Derry et al. article does a
wonderful job of surveying what we know about teaching with examples.
One of the findings is the Modality Effect.  Using text to explain
something that is visual (like a program) leads to more extraneous
cognitive processing than using audio for the explanation.  Given that
we work with computers capable of multimedia, we should be able to do
much better than textbooks."

"Why do outstanding scientists who demand rigorous proof for
scientific assertions in their research continue to use and, indeed
defend on the bias of intuition alone, teaching methods that are not
the most effective?"

[]'s
-- 
Thiago Silva
Computer Science
M.Sc. Candidate at Federal University of Pernambuco
jabber/gtalk: tsilva em jabber-br.org
http://blog.sourcecraft.info