I’m currently in the process of reading CS Education papers and I’m getting quite fed up with papers that basically says “Students have a problem understanding X” – “It’s probably because of Y” – “Let’s build of software tool to teach them X”
And they do this without actually trying to understand why the students have difficulties learning about X. I just can’t believe it – the first thing you should when you see that something is wrong is to try to understand why it’s wrong, not just build a tool and hope that is fixes everything.
It’s seem that CS Educators have their own mantra when it comes to teaching and learning: “The students have problems with this, let’s build a tool”
Or to paraphrase another paper “The students find this difficult so you have to talk slower” … SIGH
(Ohh, did I mention that it’s quite common that no evaluation of the tool is done – except “We asked the students if they liked it and they said yes”.)
