WHEN SCIENCE IS

LEARNED WHY ISN’T

COMPUTER SCIENCE?
By Kevin Ralston
What is computer science?
Computer science is a very large subject with lots of applications.
Computer scientists design new software, solve computing problems and
develop different ways to use technology.
Learning with programming

A significant amount of the software written today, and more so in the future,
interacts with naturally occurring data — text, speech, images and video,
streams of financial data, biological sequences — and needs to reason with
respect to concepts that are complex and often cannot be written explicitly in
terms of the raw data observed. Developing these systems requires software
that is centred around a semantic level interaction model, made possible via
trainable components that support abstractions over real world observations.

Today’s programming paradigms and the corresponding programming

languages, though, are not conducive for that goal. Conventional
programming languages rely on a programmer to explicitly define all the
concepts and relations involved. On the other hand, in order to write
programs that deal with naturally-occurring data, that is highly variable and
ambiguous at the measurement level, one needs to develop a new
programming model, in which some of the variables, concepts and relations
may not be known at programming time, may be defined only in a data
driven way, or may not be unambiguously defined without relying on other
concepts acquired this way.

Technology as a challenge

Researchers have been searching for alternatives in teaching programming subjects. A

reason to this is due to the fact that the compulsory subject in the field of Information
Technology has been a challenge and they are tough subjects to learn. On top of that,
lacking the understanding in concepts has reduced undergraduates' interests to pursue
further exploration and self-experimentation. In this research work, a study was
conducted to investigate the factors that lead to undergraduates' learning difficulty in
programming courses and also their perception on which teaching methodology could be
implemented to create richer and interesting learning process. The study involved 182
undergraduates from Multimedia University, Malaysia, who have taken the fundamental
programming subject named Computer Programming 1. The findings affirmed that
undergraduates prefer to learn programming by referring to examples and using drill-
practice method whereas learning via lecturing would only decrease their interest level.
The challenge has provided an evidence to call for a better solution, game-based
learning as an alternative to teach and learn computer programming subjects. Therefore,
the authors proposed a game-based learning framework which consists of components
that leverage the pedagogical aspects in designing game-based learning environment
for programming subjects. (ieee.org/08/10/18,
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5359977)

Technology related products on the market

References

(springer.com/08/10/18, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-
33486-6_3)
(ieee.org/08/10/18, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5359977)