Abstract:

In compulsory education as a subject, computer science appears for the first time in 8th grade. In the high schools with profiled education, some of the students at this time have already studied another programming language and know the basic syntactic constructions. For others, programming is a whole new and unfamiliar process in which they feel insecure. The biggest challenge is the presentation of the material, so that every student, regardless of his level, has a benefit, i.e. to upgrade their knowledge.

The research was conducted in Bulgaria, Sofia Mathematical High School in January 2022 in two classes of 8th-grade students. The aim was to clarify the relationship between students' motivation to learn and self-actualization, the difficulty of the task, and group dynamics. In each class, the students were divided into pairs. There is exactly one teenager in each pair who knows another programming language and the average grade on all their previous tasks is approximately the same for all couples. Each team had to develop an application. The trick was that the task was beyond their knowledge at this stage. The young people had to study algorithms on their own.

The lowest score on the assignment was ~ 90%. I had discussions with the two classes about the different realizations of each team. It turned out that all students had mastered not only the purpose of the lesson, but they had also learned additional constructions. In the subsequent analysis of the solutions of the task, the students and I were impressed by the submitted various creative solutions.

In the first class, all of the participants expressed a desire to continue working together on other projects, in the other class - about 50%. Impressively, despite the lower entrance results at the beginning of their computer sciences education, the class with a greater desire for teamwork steadily continues to increase its success in the subject (even after the study). At the same time, the class with less desire for teamwork, which started with a higher initial grade, decreases its success as time progresses, which we can attribute to their reluctance to work on group tasks. The study also examines the relationship between students' creativity, motivation and the complexity of the task.

The article is structured as follows: introduction, problem, methods, analysis and interpretation, conclusion and discussion.

Keywords:

Informatics, computer science, different levels, motivation of students, group tasks, ways of motivating students, selection of materials for students.