Jan 24, 2023
Visit of the CMU CS Academy at the Chair for Didactics of Computer Science
In early December, founder Prof. Mark Stehlik and program manager Erin Bozzo from the CMU CS Academy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA visited Prof. Nadine Bergner's Chair of Computer Science Education. Since 2020, the CMU CS Academy has been collaborating with the Computer Science Didactics Professorship in a joint project of creating, enhancing, and translating the CMU CS Academy platform, which is a curriculum for computer science education in Pennsylvania and beyond.
The CMU CS Academy offers a graphical approach to programming with Python in two courses, CS-0 (for high school students) and CS-1 (for high school students and undergraduates, respectively), by teaching the basic concepts of imperative programming such as variables, branches, and loops, as well as objects and functions. The programs generate graphical output such as pictures, animations and small games, which on the one hand give direct feedback in case of wrong solutions and on the other hand motivate the learners. Special attention was paid to understandable feedback and help.
During the visit, the extension of the topics to the units on artificial intelligence, object-oriented programming, data visualization, music and game development was discussed. These units have already been implemented in English and will be translated into German after the first revision.