The Class Practice for Advancing from CS Unplugged to Full-Fledged Programming
Makoto Tanabe, Tatsuhiro Tamaki, Atsushi Onishi, Makoto Sakamoto, Yasuo Uchida · International Journal of Sciences: Basic and Applied Research · 2015
The course we teach has about 40 students per class, aged 16 through 17 years. Since the students’ major field of study is Management Information, they need to learn programming techniques. However, the results of the survey described below show that not a few students consider themselves to have insufficient understanding of programming or think that they are not good at programming. We are examining ways to improve this situation. CS Unplugged is a method of teaching information science without using computers, first proposed by Tim Bell of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. While CS Unplugged is said to be effective in teaching information science. To address this topic, we implemented CS Unplugged for a group of students, and looked at their responses. Accordingly, we propose a new method of advancing from CS Unplugged to full-fledged programming. The proposed method begins with conducting a CS Unplugged activity, and then continues on to writing a program on the same theme and further to its abstraction in Java. Accordingly, we propose advancing from CS Unplugged to full-fledged programming through a new Four-Step Method. -----------------------------------------------------------------------* Corresponding author. International Journal of Sciences: Basic and Applied Research (IJSBAR) (2015) Volume 24, No 5, pp 43-50 44 The proposed method consists of the following steps: Step 1, A CS Unplugged activity; Step 2, A CS Plugged activity; Step 3, Preparing pseudocode; and Step 4, Writing Java source code.