Teaching informatics to novices: big ideas and the necessity of optimal guidance

This thesis reports on the two main areas of our research: introductory programming as the traditional way of accessing informatics and cultural teaching informatics through unconventional pathways. The research on introductory programming aims to overcome challenges in traditional programming education, thus increasing participation in informatics. Improving access to informatics enables individuals to pursue more and better professional opportunities and contribute to informatics advancements. We aimed to balance active, student-centered activities and provide optimal support to novices at their level. Inspired by Productive Failure and exploring the concept of notional machine, our work focused on developing Necessity Learning Design, a design to help novices tackle new programming concepts. Using this design, we implemented a learning sequence to introduce arrays and evaluated it in a real high-school context. The subsequent chapters discuss our experiences teaching CS1 in a remote-only scenario during the COVID-19 pandemic and our collaborative effort with primary school teachers to develop a learning module for teaching iteration using a visual programming environment. The research on teaching informatics principles through unconventional pathways, such as cryptography, aims to introduce informatics to a broader audience, particularly younger individuals that are less technical and professional-oriented. It emphasizes the importance of understanding informatics's cultural and scientific aspects to focus on the informatics societal value and its principles for active citizenship. After reflecting on computational thinking and inspired by the big ideas of science and informatics, we describe our hands-on approach to teaching cryptography in high school, which leverages its key scientific elements to emphasize its social aspects. Additionally, we present an activity for teaching public-key cryptography using graphs to explore fundamental concepts and methods in informatics and mathematics and their interdisciplinarity. In broadening the understanding of informatics, these research initiatives also aim to foster motivation and prime for more professional learning of informatics.

The transformative potential of community engagement in higher education: an analysis of service-learning effects on students, communities, and institutions.

Service-learning in higher education is gaining attention as a reliable tool to support students’ learning and fulfil the mission of higher education institutions (HEIs). This dissertation addresses existing gaps in the literature by examining the effects and perspectives of service-learning in HEIs through three studies. The first study compares the effects of a voluntary semester-long service-learning course with traditional courses. A survey completed by 110 students before and after the lectures found no significant group differences in the psychosocial variables under inspection. Nevertheless, service-learning students showed higher scores concerning the quality of participation. Factors such as students’ perception of competence, duration of service-learning, and self-reported measures may have influenced the results. The second study explores the under-researched perspective of community partners in higher education and European settings. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with community partners from various community organisations across Europe. The results highlight positive effects on community members and organisations, intrinsic motivations, organisational empowerment, different forms of reciprocity, the co-educational role of community partners, and the significant role of a sense of community and belonging. The third study focuses on faculty perspectives on service-learning in the European context. Twenty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted in 14 European countries. The findings confirm the transformative impact of service-learning on the community, students, teachers, and HEIs, emphasising the importance of motivation and institutionalisation processes in sustaining engaged scholarship. The study also identifies the relevance of the community experience, sense of community, and community responsibility with the service-learning experience; relatedness is proposed as the fifth pillar of service-learning. Overall, this dissertation provides new insights into the effects and perspectives of service-learning in higher education. It integrates the 4Rs model with the addition of relatedness, guiding the theoretical and practical implications of the findings. The dissertation also suggests limitations and areas for further research.