Abstract:

To learn algorithms is the student's first contact with programming, which is not easy because students need to develop problem-solving skills. It is possible to observe in the literature and in the University of researchers of this paper a high level of failure rates in this subjetc, where the main indications are that the students do not have understanding of the abstractions and previous knowledge of the mathematical logic. The Brazilian Computer Society qualifies the competences developed in the subject as essential for the student development in undergraduate courses in Information Technology. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to understand how the interaction between professors, students and content occurs during the Algorithms classes, offered by Federal University of Pará in Brazil. To do this, we adopted the participant observation procedures to conceive, describe and analyze the data collected, from the perspective of a trainee. The data collected were arranged by the aspects and phases proposed in the literature. The four aspects are the scenarios, where the most of the classes happened in the computer labs. The actors that are students, professor, trainee and monitor, each with its specific role defined. The events categorized in: virtual, which happened by the Moodle platform, where the observations were visualized in the progress of the subject, with the course of time and progress in the contents made available by handouts and exercise lists; physical that happened by the interaction of the classroom between the characters, highlighting the approach of hybrid teaching and the main learning resource the exercise list. And the process that was observed by the evolution of the student in the subject by the grade and the indication the contents in which the students crossed. As to the phases, these are: Primary or initial observation that aims to reach the access to the field, which was facilitated by the professor and the trainee in the curricular component; Observation with some participation that was important to be able to gain the confidence of students, professor and monitors of the subject, where one striking activity at this phase was the proposition of exercise lists; Participation with some observation, where the emphasis is to help the students with the practices of mentoring and coaching in the classroom, which it was able to collect relevant information, such as the students delays affected, the assimilation and ability to solve the proposed challenges and some ways of presenting the required content and abstractions; Reflexive observation, which aims to organize the collected data in order to extract the information to better analyze the interaction of students, professor, monitor and content. The collections were allocated according to the questions answered in the daily observation script and other annotations were described in the field of other observations in relation to some event that might not be mapped. The participant observation allowed visualizing the interaction between the characters with the content as well as its importance for the continuation in the course. Within it was verified by the research the use of virtual learning environment, the coaching and mentoring, the exercise list, exercise resolution by the professor, the monitor to give faster feedback to the student, the bonus as a stimulus. The results presented meet the research goal and can be adopted as a list of requirements for the development of a new approach to teach and learn algorithms.

Keywords:

Teaching and Learning Process, Algorithms Subject, Participant Observation, Undergraduate Education, Tutoring and Mentoring.