Thay đổi lập trình bằng học tập trải nghiệm tại NUS

In this series, NUS News highlights the University’s innovative teaching strategies, spotlighting the educators breathing life into the lessons in unique and innovative ways.

It sounds like an episode from Star Trek: a spaceship crash-lands on a strange, alien planet, stranding a group of young cadets. Lost in the jungle and woefully ill-equipped, they must find a way to communicate with the planet’s furry inhabitants – or risk being blipped out of existence.

This is not the latest instalment of a space opera but Source Academy, the flagship teaching tool of CS1101S: Programming Methodology. CS1101S is the introductory course of the computer science programme at NUS.

Part video game, part learning management system, Source Academy closely follows Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), a textbook first published in 1984 and widely considered required reading for aspiring computer scientists. But the teaching team at NUS has put a spin on it.

“Our goal is to give students experiences they can relate to,” said Associate Professor Martin Henz, one of the minds behind CS1101S and its distinctive pedagogy alongside fellow lecturers Dr Boyd Anderson, Dr Low Kok Lim, and Dr Sanka Rasnayaka. “The more meaningful their experiences are, the more effective the learning can be.”

In CS1101S, students acquire programming skills which they can then deploy to process sounds and 2D and 3D models, for instance. Source Academy contextualises these skills in a semester-long storyline, allowing students to learn through hands-on experiential learning, be it communicating with aliens or guiding robots through nuclear wastelands.

See more here