DATE: 15th February 2021
TIME: 13:00-14:00
LOCATION: Quintin’s Zoom Room
DESCRIPTION:

Switzerland is reintroducing informatics as a mandatory course into its high school curricula. In this talk I will present the effort—run by a conglomerate of Swiss universities, universities of applied science, and pedagogical universities—with the goal of quickly and thoroughly preparing enough teachers to be able to offer the new required courses. I will present the Swiss context, the overall effort, and then will focus on the specific problem of designing and implementing a sequence of informatics didactics courses. This talk is quite selfish: I hope to learn as much from you as possible. I will describe the context and our current plans in terms of contents and methods, and then open the discussion to solicit your feedback and ideas.

First published: 25 January 2021

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Speaker: Matthias Hauswirth

Matthias Hauswirth is an associate professor of informatics at the Software Institute of the Faculty of Informatics of the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland. Matthias got his PhD in the area between programming languages and software engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Matthias is fascinated by how people learn to program. In 2016 he co-organized SPLASH-E to bring together researchers from programming languages and computer science education, and he spent a sabbatical at SRI Education where he learned about the diverse research areas and methods used in education research. At USI he now leads LUCE, the Lugano Computing Education research lab, which focuses on understanding and improving programming education. Currently Matthias is involved in the organization of GymInf, a national effort to prepare existing high school teachers to teach the newly introduced mandatory informatics courses at Swiss high schools.