Odd Petter Sand: Abstraction in computing education

In BIOS1100 we noticed that many of the errors students make are abstraction errors (not working at the correct abstraction level or translating incorrectly between levels of abstraction), and there seems to be some evidence of this in the research literature as well.

One way to approach this as an instructor (experts often unconsciously work on several levels of abstraction simultaneously) is to be explicit about which abstraction level we’re working at and when we make a switch – not only to further students’ understanding of the subject matter, but also to teach abstraction as a concept.

Photo of person

Photo: Odd Petter Sand

Presentation (pdf)

The bi-weekly ODD seminar series at CCSE

The Open Discussions on Didactics (ODD) is a seminar series on Mondays at 14.15 every other week (odd week numbers) on Zoom.

The seminar will be maximum one hour, often closer to half an hour. It is an informal arena to present and discuss learning theory, educational research and teaching experiences within computational science. To cater to the highly heterogeneous backgrounds and interests of students, teachers and researchers in our environment, we aim for seminars that introduce listeners to new ideas within a broad spectrum of aspects, and that invites reflection and discussion.

Presentations need not be mature and polished - to the contrary we hope that as many as possible wants to share undigested observations and reflections in short presentations of varied form and topics. We hope to have enough contributions to frequently have the meetings as lightning talk sessions, where three different speakers will each give a 5-10-minute presentation followed by discussion.

Published Nov. 15, 2022 10:54 PM - Last modified Nov. 30, 2022 11:12 AM