Informatics-Lab: Attracting Primary School Pupils for Computer Science

Abstract

Technology has a deep impact on everyday life of most people in today's 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 survey are presented.

TASEP: A Collaborative Social Engineering Tabletop Role-Playing Game to Prevent Successful Social Engineering Attacks

“…Besides a theoretical introduction to the topic of social engineering and playing SE Tabletop, a debriefing with at least a discussion of countermeasures and awareness thereafter is required. Due to this concept, all neuro-didactic principles of Caine and Caine [7] and the COoperative Open Learning (COOL) principles [27] are observed. During the game, the participants can see the physical elements, ranging from the building at the beginning to all floors at the end.…”

Rethinking Teacher Education for the 21st Century

“…Our COOL Lab, too, started from a lab for children, the Informatics-Lab at the Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt, which initially only aimed at attracting pupils to computer science as well as at increasing subject-specific knowledge (Pasterk et al, 2016). In consequence, we extended it progressively to a Teaching-Learning-Lab, where teacher-students from all subjects can acquire additional teaching practice as well as digital competences (Demarle-Meusel, Sabitzer, and Sylle, 2017).…”

“…The first two parts -the Informatics Lab for children and the Teaching-Learning-Lab for teacher-students -were already realized at the author's former university. Both labs started with the central aims of attracting children and adolescents for informatics and enhancing computational thinking and digital literacy among children and teachers of all subjects (Demarle-Meusel et al, 2017;Pasterk et al, 2016). Furthermore, students of teacher education programs get additional teaching practice in the Teaching-Learning-Lab and can enhance their didactical and pedagogical competences.…”