I haven’t been shy to expose the insane decisions of the Greek Ministry of Education when necessary; one such time was 3 years ago, when the government removed the elective “Application Development in a Programming Environment” from 12th Grade Curriculum and the Greek University Entry Exams, in the context of a law ironically titled “New High School”. My writings reached EU headquarters in Brussels to no avail, but an e-mail I sent to the CSTA caught the attention of Chris Stephenson and played a decisive role in my being nominated and elected as International Representative on the Board of Directors. In 2014 I had an article published in the online edition of UK newspaper “The Guardian”; soon after the Minister of Education stated in public “the decision [of the previous administration] to remove the programming class option from candidates intending to study computer science was not only unacceptable, it has absolutely no ground on an international scale”. The class was eventually reinstated.
That said, maintaining an open mind commands giving credit when deserved, even to people or agencies with whom you have previously clashed. In the beginning of school year 2014-15 Computer Science teachers in Greece were happy to see that the 10th Grade CS textbook had finally been replaced with a completely new and updated version. But what really surprised us was that there was an entire chapter dedicated to the AppInventor environment, complete with examples and detailed instructions guiding students through all the stages of developing their first app.
I taught the book for the first time in an adult-learner setting in 2015-16; in the computer lab we used the MIT App Inventor tutorials on YouTube to quickly get a feel for the kind of stuff we could build (language was hardly a barrier as most Greek students have good working knowledge of English, plus the video-capture tutorials make it easy to watch video and pause in one tab while working in the other). After brainstorming an idea for our app, we decided to take last year’s 10th Grade Project a step farther by using the local dialect words they had registered on Wiktionary to build a multiple-choice quiz in AppInventor. We explored different formats and decided to go with the simplest, as the evening school students have practically zero free time for homework and all the work had to get done in a semester of two 35-minute sessions per week. Christos carefully made sure each question was a challenge with his tricky choices; Kostas quickly learned how to set up the components in “Designer” view and move the command blocks from screen to screen in “Blocks Editor” view with the AI2 “backpack”; Meletis, Kimonas and Philippos connected their Android devices to test the app and offer ideas and feedback. The quiz now comprises 20 questions with four choices each… next year we plan to take it even farther by adding more questions, levels of difficulty and – why not? – voice and illustrations for a rich multimedia experience. Soon we expect to have it published and live on Google Store: keep up with us by watching our blog (generally in Greek but we will include an English snippet for our AppInventor post).
(Camera-shy Kostas enters the questions in Designer view and then programs in the Blocks Editor”)
(Meletis, Kimonas and Philippos check out the questions for the quiz while Christos (in the background) takes a break)
In closing my last post as a Board Member of the CSTA, I would like to extend my congratulations to the new International Representative, starting July 2016, Miles Berry, and wish him the best of luck and success in his efforts. Miles, keep an eye on the situation in Greece as the third administration in three years prepares once again to downgrade the role of computer science teachers, amidst a six-year-strong financial crisis that would only benefit from the advancement of coding and other labour – as opposed to capital -intensive fields of financial activity. Sometimes the only argument we need to promote the teaching of computer science is plain common sense; and sometimes common sense is so hard to find…
Mina Theofilatou
Kefalonia, Greece
