Abstract:

Computer Science Education in secondary school often has mathematical or economical orientation, but it offers much more possibilities, especially for interdisciplinary learning and projects. This paper will show some creative ideas for a “meeting” or cooperation between computer science and foreign languages. The main purpose is not to show possibilities for computer-supported language learning – this is only a secondary objective – but to integrate topics of foreign languages in computer science or informatics. Certainly some ideas may also be realized in language lessons or interdisciplinary projects.
The ideas presented in this paper reach from easy lessons in standard software for lower secondary schools up to programming tasks for University students. The paper will report on a work in progress at Klagenfurt University about “Brain-based Informatics”. This project aims at improving the learning outcomes of a Java programming course that normally has a high failing rate.
In this semester we are creating an additional self-learning booklet for this programming course that will contain different in¬terdisciplinary tasks following the principles of neurodidactics. The booklet will contain many different exercises types as well as reading exercises (pieces of Java code) and puzzles that foster discovery learning. This is an effective method based on an automatic brain function called patterning which allows extracting rules and structures from given examples without further explanation by the teacher. The evaluation results concerning the acceptance and benefit of the booklet will perhaps be available at the conference date in March.

Keywords:

Computer science education, informatics, neurodidactics, programming, foreign language, interdisciplinary learning, discovery learning.