Features of teaching computer science in modern school

At present, our society is showing an increased interest in the development of a creative personality. In the near future, a person who has the skills of creative activity will have a significant advantage over a person using routine, well-established methods. Solving the problem of creative skills is most important in school years, especially in adolescence.

Nature has generously endowed man, but her three gifts are hard to overestimate. They helped him become a man. I mean the ability to think, create and speak. In my opinion, every teacher - a mathematician, biologist, philologist - is obliged not only to transfer the knowledge that is provided by the curriculum, but at the same time to persistently develop the child’s thinking and creative potential and teach them the correct, clear, concise, but at the same time saturated meaning of speech.

Pedagogical activity is always carried out in real time and very dynamically, which implies considerable scope for creative search, the variability of the application of various techniques and methods of work, depending on the existing situation. But, as it seems to me, today the teacher focuses his юwork on translating knowledge, and in preparing for the lessons he is concerned about finding the most effective options for presenting the material and visibility.

It is important to decide on the lessons of computer science not only and not so much the task of training in the subject, as educational. In the most general setting, the solution of these problems, as well as any general pedagogical tasks, is ambiguous. Much depends on the interpretation of such concepts as "education", "learning", "education", "enlightenment", "development", and these interpretations are not the only ones. (For a teacher: education = enlightenment (knowledge) + training (skills) + education (values).)

In practice, education can go in different directions. They talk about intelligence, worldview, character, morality ...

In our society, recently they have begun to place special emphasis on the upbringing of the creative beginning of the personality, in particular on its social activity. And finally, no results in education can be achieved if the student does not have the necessary motivation.

When you begin to move in a new direction, new horizons open up. The very formulation of the problem — the education of the student in the process of teaching a specific subject — is hardly new, although it has only begun to be vigorously discussed in our pedagogy recently. It has long been known after all: "Teacher, bring up a student." Do not “teach” what is so natural, but “bring it up”! What is behind this “bring up”?

Educate - give the children a piece of yourself, your understanding of the subject, understanding of the meaning of education, in particular informational, give your acceptance and rejection, convey your attitude to work ... And here, quite clearly, there can be no training manuals. All that the teacher wants to convey to the children is to convey, not repack, that “rational, kind, eternal” — exists only as part of his “I” —and nothing else. The teacher as a “teacher” is a conductor, but he as a “teacher” is a generator.

It is necessary to feel as often as possible in the "skin of the student." This is done very simply - it is quite enough if there is a “task in the head” that you don’t know how to approach and the book “Solving Olympiad Problems in Computer Science”, on which the third page is incomprehensible, is on the table.

We do not set the task for students to master all software products. It is simply impossible within the framework of our study hours, and it is also inexpedient. It is much more important to show children the main advantages provided by computers to humans (combinatorial, computational, graphical and modeling capabilities), which determine the breadth of computers.

Emphasis was placed on the creation of various models (objects, processes, phenomena). The first models were descriptive, then tabular, graphic, dynamic, etc. Modeling is always a creative process.

Management — again, in a practical sense — was previously understood somewhat straightforwardly, as a sequence of tasks offered to a student.

With this understanding, it turned out that teaching something, in particular computer science, is to present the student with such a set of tasks, in the process of solving which his development takes place.

Here is an example of a lesson relevant to this understanding of learning. At its beginning, a set of tasks is given to children. At the end of the lesson, go around the class, look at what they did, and sort the tasks on the blackboard. The forms of such a lesson can be quite diverse. The class can be divided into groups, but the choice of the form of employment in this case is not fundamental. After analyzing the tasks, the students either evaluate their own work or receive such an assessment from me.

But then came the understanding of the limitations of this approach - it is easy to stumble onto clean equipment and only take on solving competitive or olympiad tasks. It was necessary to clarify the wording, more precisely, to revise the whole picture, which before it seemed so harmonious and unshakable, as the Pillar of Alexandria.

As an example - only one of the situations: homework. The set of tasks that is offered to students in the classroom and at home works best for development, if such tasks are complementary. In other words, homework tasks do not so much “fix” what was done in the class as they allow the student to move forward (as if walking uphill - even a small step, but higher). But then — automatically — necessarily and the discussion made by the children at home. A very important moment in the interaction between teacher and student: the teacher is no longer a mentor, but a partner in the search for truth.

The teacher is increasingly thinking about the mark that we put the student. Some people think that it should go on a different scale - a twelve-point scale, and even that it is not needed at all. I think that the latter is an extreme measure, explained by the cult of the mark that now prevails, which can very roughly be passed on like this: good marks are a good student. In any case, it is difficult to imagine unmarked education in high school. With the mark we have something strange going on. She is exposed not for what the student has done, but for what he has not done. In fact, there is a certain gradation of student errors (gross, minor, etc.), and the mark is not set for the quality of what was done correctly, but for the quality, if I may say so, of errors: the coarser the error and the more, the lower mark. And after all medals are issued in accordance with this principle.

Of course, while I do not have full clarity in this matter. Here the student claims the top five, and nothing has been done to them. What to put? You can, of course, put a deuce and read a lesson, but somehow it is a pity. Or another example: a pupil did one of two assignments for a four - here is what to put?

These difficulties can be partially overcome in accordance with a clear principle: “The teacher’s doubt is in favor of the student.”

But in general, I am convinced that grading is an informal affair. Here is another consideration about this. The teacher puts marks for work. The “work” of a student is an integral concept, this includes not only knowledge and skills, but also their level, and also, how to say it more precisely, “the quantity and quality of labor invested” or something. This includes the way the job is presented, its design, the quality of the work algorithm, and even work considerations, such as questions that have arisen.

Finally, another component of the teacher’s activity is the atmosphere in the classroom. In this atmosphere, relationships with children and children unfold. Once, at the beginning of the journey, she asked her teacher and then colleagues: “Are you not afraid when you go to class?” “But why should I be afraid, let them fear me,” he replied.

The perfect atmosphere is teamwork in the search for truth. When the teacher participates in such a search, without any game, beautiful and, unfortunately, rare minutes’ flow, the class feels them and becomes different.

In conclusion, I would like to say the following. Only a happy teacher can give his student a few years of student happiness. Only a kind teacher can sow the seeds of kindness in the hearts of his students. Only a creatively working teacher can be a model and incentive for the creative self-development of their students. Therefore, we must be a teacher, who are waiting for our students.