And Now What Do We Do with Our Schoolchildren?

Abstract

After training activities introducing computing, many teachers seem to ask themselves “And now: what do we do with our schoolchildren?”. When we had to design a course for about twenty-five teachers, from twelve primary and middle schools, our first concern was trying to change this. For about twelve hours of the course meetings we introduced programming, then we discussed with attendees three frameworks of long programming activities: telling stories, creating group and class quizzes and relative answers, inventing riddles modeled by equations. The participants were asked to invent, design and implement an activity adapting to their students one of the frameworks discussed. Some were able to actually work with their pupils in schools, at least partly, during the course as we invited. This approach is of interest in other teachers training courses since the suggested activity frameworks can be inflected with contents that schoolchildren are dealing with in school. Also, the teachers are helped overcoming their apprehension in proposing a first long activity to their students because they can carry on such an experience during the training.