Using Spreadsheet Calculations to Demonstrate the Importance of Correct Problem Specification

Abstract

'Experiment' 'Discovery' and 'Self-teaching' are basic bricks of active learning. Despite the fact that learners are investigating notions and relationships known long before, their own discovery of something new and unknown for them results in their fascination with an irreplaceable educational value. Spreadsheets are one of the environments that can successfully be used for building stages in similar experimentation. Activities described in our paper show how spreadsheet-based calculations can lead students to a deeper comprehension of algorithms, their design, development and execution. The goal of our paper is to exemplify how the problem specification can be introduced using our method. As only well-specified problems can be solved using algorithms, deep comprehending of the relationship between the formulation of a problem and its solution(s) belongs among programming basics. Students are given a badly formulated problem and asked to solve it. Students build their spreadsheet solutions, observe many executions of their proposed solutions, formulate hypotheses and to verify them. Due to the ambiguous formulation, they get incompatible results. In the following class discussion they start understanding the origin of the confusion, realize why it happened and what should be done to avoid it in the future. In that way, the way of obtaining this core concept does not depend on a particular programming language and can be practiced before the students start using it. We naturally do not want to replace program composition training by our proposed method ?we are using it for building high-quality fundamentals before our students go to program design and development.