Informatics with the beaver
textbook for lower-secondary schools
This textbook offers a selection of computing tasks for lower-secondary schools from the archive of the Bobřík informatiky (Beaver of infomatics) contest, a Czech version of Bebras challenge. This archive contains more than a thousand tasks compiled by experts from many countries; these were fine-tuned in an international review process, selected for Czech schools and then tested on tens of thousands of pupils competing in the national rounds of the Bebras contest.
In a number of topics, the textbook complements and expands the set of iMyšlení computing textbooks, which, like this one, are offered to teachers in electronic form for free (some as online materials, others for download).
All tasks have one common denominator, and that is the development of computational thinking, some of its components. Each of the tasks contains a key informatic concept that students must grasp, understand, place it in the context of the task settings and solve the task using their own reasoning.
Each of the tasks contains an explanation of the correct solution and in what respects the other offered solutions are incorrect, as well as a text for the teacher and for the students, explaining what has the task to do with computing.
In the textbook, there is no insistence that the student names the informatic concept that occurs or knows it at all. Knowing the definitions is not an important expected learning outcome; it does not lead to the development of computational thinking and unnecessarily overwhelms pupils with redundant requirements. The tasks therefore try to avoid requiring students to have pre-knowledge.
Tasks support a different way of working with the learner and other methods than the usual hands-on informatic activity, in which something is assembled, developed or created. They are focused on reasoning, discussion, argumentation. Some allow the student to experiment by manipulating objects on the desktop. The recommended approach to the use of these tasks in teaching was tested in practice by the teachers in the lessons.
The tasks are classified according to the topics of the new Frame Educational Programme for Secondary Schools in computing in the Czech Republic and according to the expected learning outcomes (pupil competences) which they help to achieve. Assignments do not cover all topics equally; in the contest, tasks were created for some topics more often. We included tasks in the textbook that we considered to be of high quality and useful.
Tasks sorted by topic and described by learning objectives can also be used to educate computing teachers; to point out some informatic concepts hidden behind task assignments and their practical use or occurrence.