Turing Stuff! Publisher/ISBN/Ordering Information Description of Book Preface Table of Contents

Book Information

Book Description

• Suggested Grade Level
• Learning Objectives
• Suggested Time for Completion
• Assignment Description
• Relevant Sample Programs
• Suggestions for Evaluation

The price includes the right for one teacher to make copies of pages in the Turing Stuff binder for use in his or her classroom. Each teacher using Turing Stuff in the same semester should purchase their own copy of the binder.

Preface to Turing Stuff!

Computer science offers a number of unique challenges to teachers and students. It is perhaps the most dynamic of all disciplines. It is fast paced and constantly changing, but at the same time, it requires instructors to provide their students with a firm foundation of concepts and skills.

Students come to computer science with a number of preconceptions that they apply to no other discipline. The "nintendo generation" (as educator Fred D'Ignazio calls them) expect all of their interactions with technology to provide the same kind of immediate feedback, the same excitement and engagement that most of them have had in their experience with video games. But computer science is a science and not a game, and so teachers must make a concerted effort to provide students with a firm knowledge foundation without destroying their original enthusiasm and delight.

Computer science teachers are also coming to realize that the needs of their students vary greatly. Issues of gender equity and of differing language abilities impact the classroom and everyone in it every day. The teacher's challenge is to make the material relevant to all.

The need for technical education also extends far beyond the rote memorization of the syntax of any given computer programming language. More and more teachers are coming to realize that computer science education must expand beyond purely mechanical concerns to embrace creative thinking, problem solving, communication skills, social skills and presentation skills. Our students must learn not only how to solve programming problems, but how to think about problems, how to work together to find solutions, and how to communicate these solutions to their peers and superiors.

The purpose of this collection then, is to provide teachers with a wealth of ideas, of exercises and projects and quizzes from which to choose the material which best fulfills the needs of their students and classrooms. The material contained in this collection represents a wide variety of philosophies, interests, methodologies and ideas about students and the discipline. My goal as editor has been to provide teachers with as much material for as wide a variety of applications as they may come across in their classroom experience.

An understanding of the unique challenges facing computer science educators, coupled with a commitment to pedagogical soundness, provides the foundation for all of the materials produced by the Turing Development Team. The Turing programming language was developed to help teachers teach and students learn. All of the Turing resource materials, including Turing Stuff, arise from our belief in the importance of computer science education and our commitment to making it happen in the high school classrooms.

How to Use This Material

The call for submissions to this collection brought forward a wide range of materials for all high school grade levels. For simplicity's sake we have attempted to categorize these submissions according to their particular uses. This classification system breaks down into Exercises, Projects, Lessons, Quizzes, Case Studies and Research Topics. (Not all of these sections appear for each grade level but it is expected that they will do so as the number of submissions continues to expand over the years.) To some extent, though, this is an arbitrary classification system and in some cases the line between an exercise and a project is not clearly drawn. We therefore based the differentiation on our estimation of how long a given assignment would take to complete. Assignments requiring more than two or three days were placed in the Projects sections.

It is also important to note that the individual submissions within each section have been arranged in alphabetical order according to their titles. They are not arranged in order of difficulty, nor does their arrangement reflect a consideration of the order in which concepts should be taught.

Finally teachers were asked to suggest an appropriate grade level based on their experiences with their students. Teachers must therefore approach this collection with an understanding that the needs and abilities of students vary widely and what may be appropriate for a grade ten student in one school may be more suitable to a grade eleven or twelve in another, or simply not suitable at all.

I therefore encourage you to peruse the entire collection before you decide which exercises, projects or quizzes will be most effective in your classroom.

I also strongly encourage you to become a part of this important on-going project by submitting your classroom developed materials.

Chris Stephenson

Table of Contents of Turing Stuff!