Day-1

Learners, Contexts and Concepts

Perhaps more than in any other school subject, our student population is very diverse with respect to background, computing experience, attitudes, and interests. In this working group session we will explore this diversity and its consequences for teaching. We will use personas, a concept familiar in the area of user-centered design. A persona is a description of a fictional character in such detail that it can be used to reason about their preferences and behaviour – see for example http://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/personas.html (or try Google search: usability personas examples).

In your working group,

• construct at least 4 interesting student personas (corresponding to student types you consider characteristic, or challenging, or inspiring, or …);
• for each persona, choose a suitable, engaging computing context (real-life situation, activity, environment, application) to be used in education;
• for at least one of the chosen persona-context combinations, list some characteristic computing concepts to be learned.