Swiss High School Informatics Teachers Visit USI

This year, for the first time, the Swiss informatics teachers association (SVIA-SSIE-SSII) held their general assembly at USI in Lugano. The event was enriched by the edu-i-day, an afternoon of informatics education workshops organized by USI’s Luce research lab of USI Software Institute, and a speed dating session where each teacher got to meet 12 different professors from the informatics faculty.

The 50 visiting teachers, most of them from high schools, learned exciting and theoretically well-founded approaches to teach informatics and programming. Activities included a "diagram clinic" to help teachers improve representations they use for teaching, a visual approach to problem decomposition, and tools to detect and overcome common misconceptions about programming languages.

This event comes on the heels of the introduction of mandatory informatics courses into all Swiss high schools this August. These new high school courses lead to a high demand for qualified informatics teachers. USI, together with other Swiss universities, has been and still is heavily involved in the national GymInf effort to teach informatics to existing and new high school teachers.