Session moderated by Stéphane Mallat.
Each 30' paper will be followed by a 10' discussion.
Abstract
Computer science only officially entered the French education system around 2015, but without any appropriate training for teachers. Many have concentrated on computer programming, which is of course relevant but can quickly become bogged down in detail. An effective complement, first systematized in New Zealand, is to use a " unplugged " mode, i.e. without a computer. It has quickly spread worldwide, for example with Class'Code (La main à la pâte) and Interstices (Inria) in France. The idea is to use concrete examples from the physical world to illustrate five aspects of computational thinking : the precise description of a problem, the identification of relevant information, the decomposition into logical steps through good abstractions, the creation of an algorithmic solution for each step and the evaluation of the correctness and performance of the whole. I'll briefly present these ideas, followed by my unplugged experiences in a Montessori school and now in my village elementary school. I'll use a simple but intriguing opposition : the computer is stupid, but very fast and never wrong, while the child (or man) is intelligent but slow and often wrong. So how do we get from our ideas to their execution by stupid machines ?
