Active And Collaborative Learning Strategies For Teaching Computing

This paper is a survey of dozens of active and collaborative learning strategies that have been used in teaching computing. The most basic are “think-pair-share” exercises, where students think about a problem, discuss it with their neighbors, and then share it with the rest of the class. Teams may work together in class to solve problems, with the instructor providing written comments. Bringing competition into the picture always helps motivate students, e.g., having final projects compete against each other (e.g., a prey/predator game), or playing a Jeopardy-like game to review for an exam. Many such activities can be carried out online in a lab, or using laptops. A “scavenger hunt” gets students to work in pairs to surf the Web for answers to questions posed by the instructor. In another kind of exercise, students can be assigned to come up with new examples, or exercises, for the text, and then submit to an online peer-review system, where their work is reviewed by others, and the best work selected to be presented to future classes. Another strategy is to have students prepare resources to share with the class. They post these on a wiki, and the lectures become class meetings with an agenda posted on the wiki. The instructor moderates the meeting, and a student takes the minutes, and posts them on the Web. Peer assessment is used for all contributions. The paper concludes with a list of resources that include many more active and cooperative learning exercises.