The Nurnberg funnel: designing minimalist instruction for practical computer skill
The Nurnberg funnel: designing minimalist instruction for practical computer skill
Calculators are needlessly bad
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Constructivism in computer science education
Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching
The Jeliot 2000 program animation system
Computers & Education
Duality Reconstruction --- Teaching Digital Artifacts from a Socio-technical Perspective
ISSEP '08 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Informatics in Secondary Schools - Evolution and Perspectives: Informatics Education - Supporting Computational Thinking
Seeking and providing assistance while learning to use information systems
Computers & Education
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Notional machines and introductory programming education
ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)
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According to constructivism, learning takes place by constructing cognitive structures based upon current, perhaps naive, knowledge and new experiences. In the case of software artifacts like programming languages and applications, current knowledge is not a solid base upon which to build viable new knowledge. Therefore, we conjecture that explicit conceptual models constructed by educators should be able to improve the performance of users in their interaction with software artifacts, in our case the popular word processor MS-Word. The experiments described in this paper support this idea: we found that learners who used our conceptual models were able to analyze and solve problems conceptually, while learners who used task-oriented learning materials of equivalent scope employed aimless trial and error.