Keynote Speaker
Juraj Hromkovic & Regula Lacher
ETH Zürich
Teaching to Think in Informatics Lessons by Genetic Socratic Method Illustrated by Discovering Hamming Codes
Albert Einstein stated that the only true reason to go to school is to learn to think. Each subject should primarily contribute to this highest goal. Educators in informatics introduced the terms "algorithmic thinking" and "computational thinking" to express the specific contributions of informatics education to learn to think and so to argue why computer science is an unavoidable, integral part of education in general. In this invited talk, we focus on the general contribution of informatics lessons to thinking in the sense formulated by Descartes, Immanuel Kant, or in the concept of critical thinking. We present our teaching approach we call "genetic Socratic method" that deepens and refines the genetic method of Klein, Toeplitz, Kowalewski and Wagenschein. The idea is to not focus on teaching the products of science and technology (facts, models, methods, equipment, machines, etc.) and how to use them, but to empower pupils to invent, discover, and develop these products of scientific and engineering work. Using the genetic Socratic method means strengthening the role of teachers in the education process by developing teaching sequences that split the way to products of science and technology in a sequence of such "simple" challenges that the pupils can master them to high extent on their own. We illustrate this approach by showing the implementation of our method for supporting classes in the discovery of the famous self-correcting Hamming codes
Image source forthcoming Presentation materials forthcoming