The department of computer science, across many schools in the US, have been seeing a constant increase in enrollments over the last decade. This particularly impacts class sizes of introductory courses, as they are usually listed as required prerequisites courses. The students in these courses typically have very little or zero prior experience with programming. In such course settings, it is not an exaggeration to state that most students in these courses spend more one-on-one time with the course teaching assistants than they do with their course instructors. This implies that the kind of individual attention provided by the TAs of such courses to their students has a very high impact on the students’ learning and the quality of the TAs would greatly impact the quality of the course and directly or indirectly also impact the student retention rate and their interest in computer science for their academic/industry careers. We wanted to take a closer look at what it is that these TAs do, and how they do it. We observed TAs from two introductory courses for almost about two semesters, and conducted a focus group meeting each with TAs and students enrolled in these course. We found that the TAs felt responsible for instilling an interest in computer science in the students, apart from helping them to learn by themselves. We also found that the students see teaching assistants as a very valuable resource, when it comes to actually applying the concepts that they learn in lecture. Our findings tells us that there is a gap between what the TAs think they need to give as help to the students and what the students tend to expect from their TAs. We also discuss the implications of our findings and possible future work. / Master of Science

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T14:23:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Paulo Cesar dos Santos.pdf: 7657229 bytes, checksum: 2789e5a7baf7005913b0595cfff5666d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-03-07 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Nowadays, the computer science academic field is facing several challenges due to its importance and its insertion in different science fields and also, due to the rapid breakthrough of digital technologies in information and communication. There is a growing demand for places to study and graduate in computer science. Therefore a great effort is needed to improve the quality of educational process adopted by the academic institutions. The aim of this research is to analyze the planning procedures employed by the computer science course of a public school and to propose a new way of teaching, which will certainly reach better results in the teaching and learning process. In order to achieve this, we brought up a conceptual framework (CF) to support the didactic planning process of all the subjects related to the computer science course. In this research it was applied a qualitative approach, enforced nature, in an exploratory purpose. The procedures adopted were based in an experimental research. Fifteen teachers and fifty one students, from that public school, participated in the study. As a result the findings showed the behaving profile of the students, their capacity of learning and their multiple intelligence skills. There is also an analysis of the present scenario taking into consideration the different ways of planning and conducting classes. Based on data from that research it was pointed out the need of improvements in the last two aspects. However, it was prepared the framework of the CF proposed and it was given an example of its use and, finally, experiments using it were carried out by the professors. As positive results came out, the possibility of including the CF as part of class plan in that public school is real / Atualmente, na área acadêmica em computação, enfrentam-se vários desafios, dada sua importância, sua inserção nas demais áreas de conhecimento e os avanços das tecnologias digitais da informação e comunicação. É crescente a demanda por novas vagas nas graduações em ciência da computação. Por isso, faz-se necessário investir esforços para obtenção de melhorias na qualidade dos processos de ensino, adotados nas instituições acadêmicas. Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo analisar o processo de planejamento de ensino no curso de computação de uma instituição pública e propor novas práticas que ofereçam possíveis melhorias no processo de ensino-aprendizagem. Para tal, propôs-se um Framework Conceitual (FC), para apoiar o processo de planejamento de ensino em disciplinas do referido curso. Para a pesquisa foi utilizada uma abordagem qualitativa, de natureza aplicada, com objetivo exploratório. Os procedimentos adotados foram de uma pesquisa experimental. Participaram quinze professores e cinquenta e um alunos da referida instituição. Como resultados apresentam-se: os perfis de temperamentos, os estilos de aprendizagem, as inteligências múltiplas dos alunos e ainda uma análise do cenário atual das formas de planejamento e regência das aulas. A partir dos dados obtidos na pesquisa, foram apontadas necessidades de melhorias nesses dois últimos aspectos. Contudo, elaborou-se a estrutura do FC proposto, demonstrou-se um exemplo de aplicação e, finalmente, foram realizados experimentos com sua aplicação pelos professores. As conclusões apontam para resultados positivos e possibilidades de uso do FC no processo de planejamento de ensino da instituição pesquisada

Kreativitätsförderung im Studium der Informatik ist eine zentrale Herausforderung, um Studierende auf Anforderungen in ihren zukünftigen Tätigkeitsfeldern vorzubereiten. Um einen systematischen Einsatz von digitalen Medien in der Kreativitätsförderung zu ermöglichen, wird im vorliegenden Beitrag eine Systematik entworfen und begründet, die entlang der Phasen und Aktivitäten eines kreativen Problemlösungsprozesses Möglichkeiten des systematischen Einsatzes digitaler Medien identifiziert. Dabei wird deutlich, dass zum einen eine Verknüpfung von Medien notwendig ist, um den Anforderungen an einen kreativen Problemlösungsprozess gerecht zu werden. Zum anderen müssen Mechanismen entwickelt werden, die auf den Aufbau einer längerfristigen Beziehung zwischen System und Benutzer abzielen, damit Interaktion zu neuen Funktionen und schließlich zur Herausbildung neuer Kontexte führen kann.