A blog post of what Sally Fincher has meant to the CSEd research community, I’m not is a position to judge what she has meant to CSEd Research in general but I can say that I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing right now if it hadn’t been for the Scaffolding Project.
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”.)
