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Scratching the surface of advanced topics in software engineering: a workshop module for middle school students

Published: 12 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

A common approach for introducing computer science to middle school students is to teach them a simple yet engaging programming language A different approach is to teach them some advanced topic independent of any particular language or syntax We describe a 3-hour workshop module designed to do both This module has been piloted with a group of thirty 8th grade girls. It uses the Scratch programming language to develop the advanced software engineering concepts of specifications, refinement, and composition After this module, students were enthusiastic about continuing to program in Scratch independently and also felt they learned something about computer science as a discipline.

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M. D. Ernst and J. Chapin. The groupthink specification exercise. In ICSE '05: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, pages 617--618, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ACM Press.
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M. Fellows, T. Bell, and I. Witten. Computer science unplugged. http://csunplugged.org, 2002.
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Paolo A. G. Sivilotti and Murat Demirbas. Introducing middle school girls to fault tolerant computing. In SIGCSE '03: Proceedings of the 34th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, pages 327--331, New York, NY, USA, 2003. ACM Press.
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D. J. Malan and H. H. Leitner. Scratch for budding computer scientists.In SIGCSE ’07: Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer scienc;e education, pages 223--227, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM Press.
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B. Moskal, D. Lurie, and S. Cooper. Evaluating the effectiveness of a new instructional approach. In SIGCSE '04: Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, pages 75--79, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM Press.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCSE '08: Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
    March 2008
    606 pages
    ISBN:9781595937995
    DOI:10.1145/1352135
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 12 March 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. K-12 outreach
    2. refinement
    3. scratch
    4. specifications

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