Guided Exploration: an Inductive Minimalist Approach for Teaching Tool-related Concepts and Techniques

In this paper we introduce Guided Exploration as an inductive teaching approach. It is based on Minimalism and makes use of the pattern format. Guided Exploration addresses a couple of problems when teaching tool-related concepts and techniques, like how to address different student learning styles and how to address the issue that most students do not read the provided material as expected before starting to work. It also puts the focus on the concepts to be learned. We describe the design of a first course at our university where we applied Guided Exploration. The evaluation gives promising results and shows that at least some of the known problems are addressed by the new approach. PLEASE NOTE: this is the pre-print version of the CSERC’13 conference!