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Informatics and Computational Thinking: A Teacher Professional Development Proposal Based on Social-Constructivism

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Informatics in Schools. Fundamentals of Computer Science and Software Engineering (ISSEP 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11169))

Abstract

Teaching informatics with a socio-constructivist approach is the theme of the Professional Development (PD) proposal for teachers we present in this paper. This proposal is built upon the expertise we developed in the last few years by designing and delivering enrichment activities to school students, where constructivist strategies are used to let students discover informatics as a scientific discipline, and to promote computational thinking skills and problem solving competences. Starting from the analysis of teachers’ training needs, we structured the proposal into different units. We highlight their goals and contents, and illustrate some of the proposed activities. We held some training sessions to test our proposal; we report our findings and the feedback from the participants who amount to a total of ninety-five in-service and prospective teachers.

This work was partially supported by CS[4]HS by Google [13].

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Operational definition of computational thinking for K-12 education, by ISTE and CSTA http://www.iste.org/docs/ct-documents/computational-thinking-operational-definition-flyer.pdf. See also [25].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Carlo Bellettini, Violetta Lonati, Dario Malchiodi, Mattia Monga & Anna Morpurgo

Authors
  1. Carlo Bellettini
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  2. Violetta Lonati
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  3. Dario Malchiodi
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  4. Mattia Monga
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  5. Anna Morpurgo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mattia Monga .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Sergei N. Pozdniakov

  2. Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Valentina Dagienė

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Bellettini, C., Lonati, V., Malchiodi, D., Monga, M., Morpurgo, A. (2018). Informatics and Computational Thinking: A Teacher Professional Development Proposal Based on Social-Constructivism. In: Pozdniakov, S., Dagienė, V. (eds) Informatics in Schools. Fundamentals of Computer Science and Software Engineering. ISSEP 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11169. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02750-6_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02750-6_15

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