RSA #3 - Teaching Technology through Inquiry Based Instruction

Hacking Education: Using Inquiry Based Learning to Teach Tech

This week's reading focused on inquiry-based learning. Inquiry-based learning starts by introducing problems or questions for students to solve without a set path to travel. Students will seek out issues and details to research and develop further questions to continually refine and refocus their work towards a solution. I have found inquiry-based learning to be extremely effective in the classroom, and the knowledge gained to be authentic and deep. While I have had great success using inquiry-based learning in many subject matters, I have found it to be most effective in teaching technology to students. 

One of the greatest advantages of using inquiry-based learning to teach technology is the understanding that technology is always changing and evolving, thus new solutions are possible at every turn. When I teaching my students code using Code.org last year, they quickly realized that I didn't have the answers for them, and they would have to problem solve independently, think creatively, and work persistently. They rose to the challenge and made me realize how much more they were capable of achieving. 

The linked article, "Teaching Computer Science Through Inquiry", discusses using inquiry-based learning in a field not often associated with this method. The author argues that computer science is often taught simply is engineering, but would be and more effectively taught as a science as well. Utilizing inquiry-based lessons, students will focus less on asking "How do we make X?",  instead asking, "How does X work?" 

The author adds, what I believe, is an excellent distillation of what inquiry based learning would look like in a technology or computer software class. "Teaching computer science as inquiry might be a great way to teach debugging skills.  We would think about each run of a program as an experiment, and we would explicitly 'identify assumptions,' 'construct explanations,' and 'consider alternative explanations', ... encouraging students to explore 'how things work' and what their models of computation are and what they should be."  While the research on inquiry-based learning in computer science is limited, I believe it is a natural fit as activities such as identifying a virus or troubleshooting computer software. What is hacking if not inquiry-based process?

SOURCE:
Guzdial, M. (2010) Teaching Computer Science through Inquiry. Computing Education Blog. Retrieved from https://computinged.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/teaching-computer-science-through-inquiry/