Leading team:
- Prof. Michal Armoni
Project team:
- Dr. Liat Nakar
Brief
Pattern-oriented instruction is an approach for teaching computer science which relies on the teaching of algorithmic patterns. This approach is especially suitable for introductory courses. Pattern-oriented instruction has been shown to improve the tendency of students to acknowledge patterns and incorporate them into their solutions, thus demonstrating abstraction skills in general, and analogical reasoning and problem decomposition in particular. This project focuses on high school students and examines the effects of pattern-oriented instruction on students' abstraction skills in wider contexts. In addition, it examines the teachers' abstraction-related teaching approach and its effect on students' abstraction skills.
This is the doctoral research of Dr. Liat Nakar.
Further reading:
- Nakar, L. & Armoni, M. (2023). On Teaching Abstraction in Computer Science: Secondary-School Teachers’ Perceptions vs. Practices. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on United Kingdom and Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER’23), Swansea, Wales, the UK. p. 8:1-7. ACM.
- Nakar, L., & Armoni, M. )2025). Aiming towards abstraction: Does algorithmic-pattern-oriented instruction promote the teaching of abstraction? In Proceedings of the 56th SIGCSE ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, V. 1. (SIGCSE TS 2025), Pittsburgh, PA, USA. p. 812-818). ACM.