Critical Thinking Sheets: Encouraging critical thought and sketched implementation design

Teaser for Critical Thinking Sheets: Encouraging critical thought and sketched implementation design

Abstract

Learners are often asked to create an interface as part of their course. For example, they could be asked to “create a calculator”, “develop a stopwatch” or “develop an image processing app”. But students often struggle to know how to start. At the same time, teachers want their students to think critically about their assignments and plan how they will build an interface. We have developed, and used for two academic years, a structured “critical thinking sheet (CTS)”. It is a method to help students consider a problem from different views, and help them critically consider different aspects of the task. The sheet gets the learners to (1) sketch the solution, (2) explain the challenge, (3) detail system components, (4) list algorithmic steps, and (5) explain next steps and issues of implementation. In this paper we introduce the sheet, explain how we have used it, and discuss learner experience.

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Citation

J. C. Roberts and P. D. Ritsos, “Critical Thinking Sheets: Encouraging critical thought and sketched implementation design,” in EduCHI 2019 Symposium: Global Perspectives on HCI Education, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI 2019), Glasgow, UK, 2019.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Roberts-Ritsos-EduCHI-2019,
  author = {Roberts, Jonathan C. and Ritsos, Panagiotis D.},
  title = {{Critical Thinking Sheets: Encouraging critical thought and sketched implementation design}},
  editor = {St-Cyr, O. and McDonald, C.M. and Churchill, E.F.},
  booktitle = {EduCHI 2019 Symposium: Global Perspectives on HCI Education, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI 2019), Glasgow, UK},
  year = {2019},
  month = may
}