Stefan Pasterk

Basic Digital Education in Austria - One Step Further.

Based on a nearly thirty years long history to implement digital education in Austrian primary and lower secondary schools, this paper deals with the current development and strategies to encounter this challenge. After a literature review across national borders and some findings on different approaches in two different countries, a compressed historical view and exemplary empirical results from online-surveys describe the current Austrian situation. The paper closes with the outlines of the new curriculum “Basic Digital Education” and some remarks about it.

A Graph-based Approach to Analyze and Compare Computer Science Curricula for Primary and Lower Secondary Education

A growing number of countries start to introduce computer science related topics in primary education, but their curricula or educational standards significantly differ in various aspects. This contribution introduces a way to analyze and compare curricula, education standards and competency models, using a graph-based representation form and several graph-theoretical metrics.

Informatics-Lab: Attracting Primary School Pupils for Computer Science

Technology has a deep impact on everyday life of most people in todays society. Informatics is a basic element of this evolution and is. therefore getting more and more important for education, too. To introduce children of all ages to different topics of informatics, the Regional Educational Competence Centre for Informatics in Carinthia, Austria, organized a four-week lasting Informatics-Lab. During their holidays in July 2014, children were able to visit our university, participate in workshops and get a first or a deeper impression of topics like encryption, operating systems, networks or modelling. What distinguished this project from other labs was that the children learned from trainees aged between 16 and 19 years as well as from their peers. Furthermore, trainees and visitors developed new teaching material on their own. This was an important element of the project as it considered different learning concepts like learning by teaching. The lab got positive feedback from both, children and parents. A pre-post comparison showed that the project had positive effects on the interest as well as on the attitude towards informatics. This paper gives some background information about the learning concept and an overview of the activities and stations. Furthermore, the results from an empirical

Digital literacy or computer science: Where do information technology related primary education models focus on?

The present deep impact of information technology on society results in an increasing number of countries starting to introduce information technology related topics even in primary schools. However, the resulting curricula, educational standards and competence models differ in several aspects like in their structure or competence focus, making them hard to assess and to compare. This contribution presents a graph-based approach that eases the comparison and that can be used to exemplify different focal points easily. In order to do so, we looked at several educational models and used a graph-based representation form to display the emphasis on either Digital Literacy and/or Computer Science concepts.

Brain-based teaching in computer science: neurodidactical proposals for effective teaching

Brain-based teaching is neither a method nor a concept. It is rather a way of teaching that tries to support the learning and memory process in all phases from lesson design over input and practice up to the transfer of knowledge and competencies in real situations. The proposals for brain-based teaching come from neurodidactics or educational neuroscience that combines findings of brain and memory research, didactics, pedagogy and psychology. This paper aims at presenting concepts and methods that can facilitate learning and proposals for designing computer science lessons by considering the functioning of the brain and the memory.