Experience and Educationis the best concise statement on education ever published by John Dewey, the man acknowledged to be the pre-eminent educational theorist of the twentieth century. Written more than two decades after Democracy and Education(Dewey's most comprehensive statement of his position in educational philosophy), this book demonstrates how Dewey reformulated his ideas as a result of his intervening experience with the progressive schools and in the light of the criticisms his theories had received. Analysing both "traditional" and "progressive" education, Dr. Dewey here insists that neither the old nor the new education is adequate and that each is miseducative because neither of them applies the principles of a carefully developed philosophy of experience. Many pages of this volume illustrate Dr. Dewey's ideas for a philosophy of experience and its relation to education. He particularly urges that all teachers and educators looking for a new movement in education should think in terms of the deeped and larger issues of education rather than in terms of some divisive "ism" about education, even such an "ism" as "progressivism." His philosophy, here expressed in its most essential, most readable form, predicates an American educational system that respects all sources of experience, on that offers a true learning situation that is both historical and social, both orderly and dynamic.

经验与教育 = Experience and education

What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Normal accidents. Living with high-risk technologies

Cognitive engineering

It represents a universally applicable attitude and skill set everyone, not just computer scientists, would be eager to learn and use.

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Computational Thinking 計算論的思考

Learning of programming and, more generally, of computer science concepts is now reaching the public at large. It is not only reserved for people who studied informatics (computer science) or programming anymore. Teaching programming to schoolchildren presents many challenges: the big diversity in ability and aptitude levels; the big amount of different tools; the time-consuming nature of programming; and of course the difficulty to motivate schoolchildren to keep them busy with hard work. There are various platforms that offer to learn coding and programming, in particular game-based platforms, which are more and more popular. These latter exploits of the gamification process focused on increase in motivation and engagement of the learners. This paper reviews the main kinds of online platforms to learn programming and more general computer science concepts, and illustrates the review with concrete platforms examples.

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Learning Programming through Games and Contests: Overview, Characterisation and Discussion

We give a practical approach to recast an existing, mature traditional university course into a MOOC. The approach has two steps. The first step consists in transforming the existing course into a course with two tracks: a SPOC and a traditional track. This step is done concurrently with teaching the course. The second step, which takes place one semester later, is the opening of the SPOC to the world as a MOOC. We have implemented this approach with the course LFSAB1402 Informatics 2, a second-year bachelor university-level programming course taught to all engineering students at Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL), that is, approximately 300 students per year. The approach has four advantages. First, it allows to design a SPOC covering only part of the material of the traditional course. A 5 credit (ECTS) one-semester course has almost twice the material of a six-week MOOC with two/three-hour lessons per week. Second, the workload of the transformation is reduced. It can be done incrementally during the teaching of the traditional course. Third, it allows us to gain experience in the world of MOOCs in a relative painless manner. And fourth, since the transformation is a large step, the risk of having problems in the final MOOC is reduced.

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Recasting a traditional course into a MOOC by means of a SPOC

This paper discusses the use of formal methods for analysing human-computer interaction. We focus on the mode confusion problem that arises whenever the user thinks that the system is doing something while it is in fact doing another thing. We consider two kinds of models: the system model describes the actual behaviour of the system and the mental model represents the user's knowledge of the system. The user interface is modelled as a subset of system transitions that the user can control or observe. We formalize a full-control property which holds when a mental model and associated user interface are complete enough to allow proper control of the system. This property can be verified using model-checking techniques on the parallel composition of the two models. We propose a bisimulation-based equivalence relation on the states of the system and show that, if the system satisfies a determinism condition with respect to that equivalence, then minimization modulo that equivalence produces a minimal mental model that allows full-control of the system. We enrich our approach to take operating modes into account. We give experimental results obtained by applying a prototype implementation of the proposed techniques to a simple model of an air-conditioner.

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A bisimulation-based approach to the analysis of human-computer interaction

Automated systems are increasingly complex, making it hard to design interfaces for human operators. Human-machine interaction (HMI) errors like automation surprises are more likely to appear and lead to system failures or accidents. In previous work, we studied the problem of generating system abstractions, called mental models, that facilitate system understanding while allowing proper control of the system by operators as defined by the full-control property. Both the domain and its mental model have Labelled Transition Systems (LTS) semantics, and we proposed algorithms for automatically generating minimal mental models as well as checking full-control. This paper presents a methodology and an associated framework for using the above and other formal method based algorithms to support the design of HMI systems. The framework can be used for modelling HMI systems and analysing models against HMI vulnerabilities. The analysis can be used for validation purposes or for generating artifacts such as mental models, manuals and recovery procedures. The framework is implemented in the JavaPathfinder model checker. Our methodology is demonstrated on two examples, an existing benchmark of a medical device, and a model generated from the ADEPT toolset developed at NASA Ames. Guidelines about how ADEPT models can be translated automatically into JavaPathfinder models are also discussed.

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A formal framework for design and analysis of human-machine interaction

Promoting computer science though programming is widespread all around the world. However, there are not always enough human resources to support trainings and teaching of pro- gramming. At the same time, online programming contests have also spread and are getting ac- cessible to people at large. This paper is about how it is possible to use online programming contests to build trainings and to support the teaching of programming. The paper first reviews how programming contests can be classified. It then proposes classification criteria and applies them to a selection of existing online programming contests. Based on that classification criteria and review, the paper discusses how such contests can be used to build programming trainings and also to support teaching. Finally, the paper presents an online platform that allows people to create a contestant profile to compare them to other users of the platform and to discuss about the con - tests they took part in. All this work aims at increasing the motivation of people when learning to program and at promoting computer science among young people, with limited human resources and using online social connections between people.

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Sébastien Combéfis

Papers

Learning Programming through Games and Contests: Overview, Characterisation and Discussion

Recasting a traditional course into a MOOC by means of a SPOC

A bisimulation-based approach to the analysis of human-computer interaction

A formal framework for design and analysis of human-machine interaction

Programming Trainings and Informatics Teaching Through Online Contests