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• Teaching student teachers: various components of a complex task

  55-72

  Hans Humenberger

  Hans-Christian Reichel

  Views:

  18

  In this paper we summarize various aspects of teacher training and teaching student teachers (mainly concerning teachers of upper secondary school and High school). We stress several hints and recommendations to better achieve the obviously important aim: they should learn doing, understanding and teaching mathematics!
  Of course, our view is particularly influenced by European traditions, but we think most of them equally apply to teacher training and teaching student teachers elsewhere. Neither is the paper meant to give an all sided overview about the problem field of teacher education as a whole, nor does it contain provocative, completely new ideas. We just want to describe our view of some aspects, based primarily on our personal experience in the mentioned field.

• An interactive animation for learning sorting algorithms: How students reduced the number of comparisons in a sorting algorithm by playing a didactic game

  45-62

  Ladislav Végh

  Veronika Stoffová

  Views:

  8

  Learning programming and understanding algorithms is one of the hardest tasks for novice computer science students. One of the basic algorithms they learn during the introductory programming and algorithms courses are the sorting algorithms. Students like learning these and other algorithms by animations and didactic games, however, these animations are not educationally useful in every case. In this article, we present our educational sorting game, which can be used to introduce the topic of sorting algorithms. The didactic game can be used later too, as a demonstrative tool for explaining the more efficient, quicksort algorithm. We conducted a pedagogical experiment, in which we examined the process of development of sorting algorithms by students while they used the mentioned didactic game. The results showed that students were able to create an algorithm to solve the sorting problem, and they improved its effectiveness by reducing the number of comparisons in the algorithm. They were also able to understand the importance of the efficiency of algorithms when we demonstrated them the quicksort algorithm using the same tool after the experiment.