| Abstract [eng] |
While Informatics is a well-established discipline in higher education all around the world, it is not the case for secondary and primary education. From early 2000s what was taught at school was not Informatics as a subject with its own methods, concepts, and principles, but information technology oriented teaching with the goal that the use of software tools was sufficient for students to acquire practical skills (Schwill, 1997; Hadjerrouit, 2009). Informatics is becoming a common, mandatory subject in school curricula of an even increasingly number of countries across the world. Practically, Informatics is a necessary skill for European students to get the Informatics-intensive jobs of the 21st century. Educationally, Informatics is an invaluable intellectual tool for developing essential conceptual cognitive skills that will serve students through their careers and through all areas of future work (Gander et al., 2013). Informatics is the only subject that teachers of primary schools have to teach, but never studied themselves (Hromkovic, Lacher, 2017). Teachers need to understand the contributions of Informatics to the understanding of the world and to the growth of intellectual abilities of their students, and that they focus on teaching fundamental and, therefore, stable concepts of Informatics instead of operating instructions for short-term applications. In order to provide up-to-date Informatics education in schools that integrates every-day experiences of students and thus also activates their intrinsic motivation, current developments and innovations in Informatics must not be neglected. At the same time, general Informatics education needs to focus on central ideas and concepts of Computer Science (Grillenberger et al., 2016). The concept can be understood as extensive information on a particular object, existing in the human mind. Concepts of Informatics are tightly related with our intentions: what we would like to teach at school. The concept can be defined as a set of objects having common attributes. Informatics concepts play a central role for understanding fundamentals of computers, information technologies, software, hardware and other devices. However, in practice very often the training of skills in application software is given much more room at schools than to discover and to go deeper into concepts of Informatics. In this thesis we present the development of concept-driven Informatics education model for extension of an educational platform. The use of extended educational platform will help learners as well as primary school teachers to acquire competences of Informatics education. |
