A new approach to teaching information technologies: shifting emphasis from technology to information

Abstract

Being aware of the increasing pedagogical challenges posed when using and teaching IT in schools, we have begun a widespread initiative at the Technical University of Munich to improve the practice of teaching IT in secondary schools in Bavaria. We offer a curriculum to students who intend to become secondary school teachers. The goal of the curriculum is to offer students a more general viewpoint, leaving behind the more narrow hard-and software specific approaches that schools have followed most often. Guided by the process of developing software, we propose to concentrate on modelling techniques, especially object-oriented versions. We intend, furthermore, to educate as many teachers at a university level in computer science as possible. To that end we have developed a new, lean curriculum for the education of teachers, which also serves as a basis for an in-service training project. In addition, we plan to improve the access that schools have to modern information technologies. We have built an Internet node for a variety of rural schools in Rosenheim.

Exploring teachers' attitudes towards object oriented modelling and programming in secondary schools

“…Concerning the debate, whether Informatics should be implemented in school curricula as a compulsory, dedicated subject or integrated into other subjects like Mathematics, Languages or Science, we always argued that it would be absolutely necessary to combine these two policies (firstly published in [15]). Some of our arguments in favour of a compulsory subject were the following [13]:…”

Designing modern informatics education for future managers and advanced users according to their knowledge base

“…Based on studying the accessible sources of literature e.g. (Basl et al, 2011), (Bureš, 2007, (Dale, 1969), (Drucker, 2001), (Eckstein, Manns, & Voelter, 2001), (Hubweiser, Broy, & Brauer, 1997), (Schwill, 1998), (Strawman, 2004), (Voříšek, Pour, & Buchalcevová, 2015) the latest knowledge and trends in the fi eld of ICT mentioned above, implementation and integration of IS, published experience of experts from the area of development, contents of foreign universities curriculums, contents for educating experts in the fi eld of "business informatics" and software engineering, our own knowledge and skills we have decided for a concept of education in two parallel lines. The new structure of the Informatics II Course, used and adjusted during last ten years presents Tab.…”

Computer science/informatics in secondary education

“…Following this approach, the students should learn mainly how to deal with extensive or complex information [11]. Hubwieser et al [33] had introduced a special information-oriented curriculum that was based on modeling already in 1997: "The emphasis lies on the representation of information about complex systems, which we call modeling. In our opinion these techniques support the students in nearly all problem solving tasks, within Informatics as well as within all other subjects".…”