Abstract
This position paper presents an unplugged, problem-solving-based approach for teaching computer science to children. Our approach is based on story telling, where each story consists of parallel parts, and aims at developing children’s observation and reasoning skills. The aim is to understand the global plot by identifying the interaction occurring among different characters in terms of synchronisation, collaboration and information sharing. In this sense we focus on concurrency, a very challenging computer science area, to show that children aged 7–14 can be exposed to real-life instantiations of a number of computer science concepts, understand them and even apply them in modelling and analysis contexts.
Work partly funded by Seed Funding Grant, Project SFG 1447 “Formal Analysis and Verification of Accidents”, University of Geneve, Switzerland.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my children Claudio and Chiara who represented the age groups 7–10 and 11–14, respectively, in carrying out the activities described in this paper. A special thank to my friend and colleague Karl Lermer whose conversations with his talkative parrots and with myself inspired the children story presented in this paper. Karl also hosted me in Zurich during my visit at ZAHW, when I was writing this paper.
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Cerone, A. (2021). From Stories to Concurrency: How Children Can Play with Formal Methods. In: Cerone, A., Roggenbach, M. (eds) Formal Methods – Fun for Everybody. FMFun 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1301. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71374-4_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71374-4_10
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