Abstract
At the beginning of this chapter, we define the concepts “metaphor” and “analogy” and we discuss their use as a teaching tool—both in general education and in computer science, in particular. We give an overview of prior research publications that discuss various aspects of using metaphors in education. Afterwards, we dedicate a section to the major caveats we should keep in mind when using metaphors. Finally, we focus on the use of metaphors related to computers, and in particular their use in computer science. In this section, we show examples of both good and flawed metaphors. At the very end of this introductory chapter, we include a brief set of guidelines on how to read the next chapters of this book.
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Notes
- 1.
For this particular metaphor things are taking a turn for the better—some of the modern tools already “auto-save” your documents and actually store the entire edit history, so that each state of the document is actually saved, in the original sense of the word.
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Forišek, M., Steinová, M. (2013). Introduction. In: Explaining Algorithms Using Metaphors. SpringerBriefs in Computer Science. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5019-0_1
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