Informatics in Education

The Bebras challenge offers pupils and teachers an engaging opportunity to discover informatics, by solving small tasks that aim at promoting computational thinking. Explanations and comments that reveal the computing concepts underlying the tasks are published after the contest, and teachers are encouraged to use this material in their school practice. In this paper we present an exploratory study aimed at investigating how teachers can make use of Bebras material; in particular our interest is understanding whether teachers are able to identify, comprehend, and apply the computing concepts implied by Bebras tasks, and how they can integrate them into their teaching practice. We qualitatively analyzed teaching projects developed by Italian teachers during a workshop on computing education and based on Bebras tasks; the analysis shows that teachers are in general able to build upon the tasks soundly, but it also raises some critical issues.

Coding and computational thinking have recently become compulsory skills in many school systems globally. Teaching these new skills presents a challenge for many teachers. A notable example of professional development designed using Constructionist principles to address this challenge is ScratchEd. Upon reflecting on her experiences designing and running ScratchEd, Karen Brennan identified five tensions faced by professional development providers, and proposed that these tensions could be used for scrutinising and critiquing professional development. In this paper we analyse, through the lens of Brennan's tensions, the process we have followed to design, evaluate and improve professional development. We argue that while we have experienced the same tensions, the extent to which we assess learning is a new tension that extends those identified by Brennan. There are strong reasons to assess teachers' knowledge, however, quantitative measures of learning could be at odds with Constructionism: as Papert argued in Mindstorms, constructionist educators should study their learning environments as anthropologists. Consequently, we have called this new tension the tension between anthropology and assessment.