Abstract:

The COVID19 pandemic triggered a radical change in the teaching/learning processes. Professors, who usually work in a face-to-face environment with well-practiced teaching strategies, were forced to modify this model to achieve the expected learning in students. In a few days, they transformed 100 percent face-to-face courses into fully-distance courses. Within this change, they faced meaningful educational and emotional challenges that had not been presented before.

In addition to this, the students who currently take classes at a professional level have well-developed skills for handling digital media, giving two different points of view: On one hand, these well-used digital media are excellent tools for learning, but on the other, they are tools that they use as distractors spending too much time and causing poor performance in their courses.

Besides this, computer science courses have abstract content that requires students to be focused during the presentation and internalize the knowledge through exercises of developing algorithms and codes of the techniques seen in class. That is why it is so relevant to incorporate a good combination of active learning strategies using different tools to exercise the topics exposed by the professor during class time.

This work presents teaching strategies using different computational tools during the two semesters of 2020 in two subjects of Computational Sciences: Data Structure and Analysis and Design of Algorithms, using a distance learning model, proving to be very helpful to get the attention of the students in these abstract topics and increasing the motivation of the students to practice the different topics, thereby managing to develop the necessary skills to be able to get a passing grade of the course.

Keywords:

Computer science, distance learning, adaptative learning, technological learning tools.