Page 88 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

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Chapter 4
4.3.2
for the future, and it concerns “soft CS”. Furthermore, modeling lays a connection between CS and other disciplines and models could be useful for students’ subsequent studies. In words of teacher 10, “... that you need to be able to design a test setup with CS, ehm, digital means so that you can get a lot of results, but processing these results is no more CS, that’s physics.”
Knowledge of students’ understanding (M2)
The prerequisite knowledge needed to learn modeling and skills needed to make models are related to:
• Student’s characteristics: such as age and development, mindset, attitude, and other skills. For example, teacher 6 believes “it is all very complex, they [students] are only 15 years old” and teacher 7 is reminded of Bloom’s taxonomy and fills in “it gets easier as they get older”. Fantasy, creativity and an analytical mindset also play a role. Attitude is important: several teachers stress the significance of perseverance. Some mention differences among students: teacher 6 expects to see different skill levels when it comes to tackling practical assignments.
• Student’s knowledge pertaining: the other discipline, programming or computational thinking, and modeling aspects. Teachers 4, 5, 6 and 8 expect the students to know something about the phenomenon from other discipline they are modeling. Almost all the teachers expect their students to be familiar with programming before they embark on modeling. However, teacher 9 also sees the possibility to use modeling as a vehicle to teach programming. Teachers 4, 8 and 10 expect their students to be familiar with several modeling aspect such as being able to explain how a particular model works, abstraction, and in words of teacher 8, “you need to learn to recognize the actors and you need to be able to see the relations among them, to ...ehm ... to describe them, to translate them into a model”.
• The chosen teaching approach: teacher 8 mentions the interplay between the teaching materials used and the necessary prerequisite knowledge and says “but you need to sense what extras you should offer” and adds, ”It’s quite abstract so I think about the 12th grade, but if you present it simply enough, then you could teach it in the 10th