FOSTERING WRITING HABITS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE: A ROAD TO MEANINGFUL LEARNING

1 Maria Feldgen, Facultad de Ingenieria, Universidad de Buenos Aires, [email protected]. 2 Osvaldo Clua, Facultad de Ingenieria, Universidad de Buenos Aires, [email protected]. Abstract  Writing activities have been reported as a uniquely valuable mode of learning. Writing forces one to think, and it is an effective way to introduce discussion on current topics into the classroom and to contribute to an effective teamwork. We created an active and collaborative learning environment in the first of two related courses. We required every student in a team to write technical reports as material for discussion for the in-class and out-of-class assignments. They learned to organise material and clarify concepts, to ask questions, to process the information as a group in the classroom and then met outside of the class to finish up the project tasks. In the second course we had students from the first course and from another traditional course. We asked them to search for material for the in-class assignments about one central concept. In this paper we describe how the writing assignments in the previous course developed working habits. We observed that students who took our first course voluntarily wrote informal reports linking and organising the information they searched for. In the discussions and questions they used the reports as experts do. They used the learned communication and interaction skills during teamwork, they did not require additional support for these soft skills. This was not the fact with the teams with students from the other course. Finally, we describe how they performed in the final exams and in the counselling meetings.