Abstract:

The IT workforce has been growing steadily in popularity and demand among parts of the global workforce for decades. Consequently, introducing informatics as a separate school subject has already become indispensable. Therefore, the education of informatics teachers is also compulsory. Informatics teachers should educate students in all aspects of the informatics domains, from digital literacy to programming skills. Informatics has existed as a separate school subject in Croatia since the early 1990s, and the education of Informatics teachers at the universities started simultaneously. Every student aiming to be an Informatics teacher must attend Informatics classes in elementary and high schools as an apprentice and observe the teaching process in the natural class teaching environment. After attending such lessons, the informatics teacher student will prepare and hold an exam lecture in the class in front of the mentor and a university professor of the Didactics of Informatics course, whose task is to evaluate the lesson. The authors take notes about the lecture performance during such exam lessons. After the exam lesson, the student, the mentor, and the professor comment on the lesson. The authors, a faculty professor of Didactics of Informatics and an Informatics teacher mentor, have attended hundreds of students' lessons as observers over the last ten years. During that time, the paper's authors collected and documented common students' mistakes in teaching. This paper reports common teaching mistakes made by novice teachers along with the guidelines for teaching Informatics.

Keywords:

Informatics, Informatics teachers, computer science teachers, informatics education, guidelines for teaching.