Reflection from two areas on the issues of getting students in Higher Education (HE) to become better problem-solvers earlier. Asks some questions about should HE increase the use of unplugged activities? If so, is there any evidence that it will help? What lessons can HE learn from what is happening in Primary Schools? What can schools learn from what is and has happened in HE teaching of programming and problem-solving? The answer's not on the screen. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317179170_The_answer%27s_not_on_the_screen [accessed May 28, 2017].

1. The Answers not on the Screen
Gary Hill, Scott Turner, Katharine Childs

2. Some students
when asked about
a problem always
look to the screen
for the answer?
Observation

3. Over 10 years of investigating
problem-solving one of the problems
identified is getting students to look
away from the screens.

4. Question
Could some lessons from primary
schools about teaching
programming be useful and vice
versa?

5. Schools have been playing with
unplugged computing.

6. Materials such as the Barefoot
Computing programme may be
drawing heavily on the work of Bell et
al to provide a mix of off-screen and
on-screen activities for primary
students to help them learn how to
write simple programs

7. Is it partly to do with the Waterfall
model?

8. Wing highlighted the importance of
thinking like a computer scientist.

9. With the introduction of the new
Computing National Curriculum [6] in
September 2013, computational
thinking [20,21] has been promoted as
including the following concepts:

10. • Logical reasoning: predicting and
analysing
• Algorithms: making steps and rules
• Decomposition: breaking down into
parts
• Abstraction: removing unnecessary
detail

11. • Patterns and generalisation: spotting
and using similarities
• Evaluation: making judgements

12. A randomised trial of code clubs
showed that children who attended
increased their skills in coding
significantly, although there no
corresponding increase in
computational thinking skills could be
demonstrated.

13. In HE there is the debate often about
language choice and object- first or
not; but should the argument also be
problems first [2] and focusing
Computational Thinking and then
coding after?

14. Should HE be looking at greater use
of unplugged activities? From
personal experience, when asked to
work on a problem, students of- ten
go straight to a computer and start
typing. Would it be better to get them
to step back and write down a design
every time?

15. Is there lesson that Schools can learn
from HE? For example our
experiences of teaching logic and
number representation.