Including part-whole-thinking in a girls' engineering course through the use of littleBits: A practical report on including part-whole-thinking into the content of computer science education
Nils Pancratz, Ira Diethelm · 2018
A basic principle of Computer Science is to break problems down into parts. Object Orientation, the paradigm Divide and Conquer, and Modularity are only three examples that make use of Part-Whole-Thinking, which is a fundamental skill enabling Life Long Learning. It includes the ability to cognitively (and often subconsciously) identify Part-Whole-Relationships, which help us to understand objects, systems, processes, definitions, and concepts. As part of a two-year Girls' Engineering course held at a Northern-German secondary school it was tried to improve students' overall understanding of Information Technology by including Part-Whole-Thinking into its course content. The way this was done was through the use of littleBits for rapid prototyping of various Internet-of-Things devices. In this short paper, this practical approach is presented and the advantages in explicitly making Part-Whole-Thinking a central topic in class are discussed.