Assistant teacher course/Individual curriculum/Computer science

Computer science

Computer science isn't really a hard science, unless it's seen as a branch of mathematics; that's why computer science should be taught with one or several actual sciences (e.g. mathematics) as the focus of attention. To make computer science more interesting educators may combine it with play or creative work, which is suitable for children or teenagers who are not yet interested. For an individual curriculum, however, it is appropriate to assume that the children or teenagers already are interested in computer science, so the additional motivation is probably not required and computer science can be used to motivate harder science instead.

An individual curriculum for a child that isn't interested in science or needs more encouragement to stay interested can begin with programming environments like Alice or CeeBot but should introduce more serious topics in between and as the curriculum goals.

Example: Write a function plotter

Writing a function plotter is a sensible project with a focus on mathematics that can be useful to improve a pupil's understanding for mathematics. A function plotter can be extended and enhanced over several years to follow the growing mathematical knowledge of the pupil. As part of an individual curriculum the function plotter has a strong relation to school education and goals can be found that develop in parallel with the mathematics curriculum, which makes a function plotter a good choice.

Tasks:

• Write your own functional programming language; an interpreter for the evaluation of simple expressions is a good start and can be extended later on.
• Write a visual function plotter class, which makes use of your programming language.
• Write a user-friendly user interface, which makes use of the function plotter class.