General Info
"GoodNews not FakeNews" is the result of a coding process within the Olympics of Problem Solving (MIUR-Uni.Bo) project.
The project is annually organized by the University of Informatics of Cesena, aiming to facilitate the development young students’ social competences, including computational thinking through logical-mathematical, active citizenship skills and digital skills.
At the same time, the project contributes to the overall formation of the student, according to the EU key competences. The activities aim to develop mature and aware students, responsible for themselves and for others, and capable of cooperating between each other.
The project target are students of primary school fifth grade children.
Students took part to activities of coding, making and programming competitions, where we noticed a strong participation and activeness by the girls. These activities are designed for the conception and implementation of a program based on a given theme.
The production environment is Scratch: an easy and very effective tool to teach the basics of block codes for programming to primary school students. Studying math through coding with the objective of producing something fun and creative is a very impactful way of providing complex and ordered reasoning skills to young students. This method is particularly effective as the learned topics stick to the long term memory instead of the short term.
The students were divided in teams to realize a series of animation spots entitled "GoodNews NOT FakeNews" to explain to their peers how insidious the world of the web can be and how to defend against misleading information. This activity was very important as part of the vertical curriculum and also for the development of transferring skills and mutual learning.
The topic was selected through a discussion between the students, contributing in boosting students to critical thinking, and to express and build their opinion. When the topic was chosen each team chose different ways of presenting the topic. Some chose to take inspiration from the fairy tale “Pinocchio”, others through a structure similar to a TV spot.
Students presented the work done with great "professionalism", illustrating the methodological and technical aspects of the project and its implementation process, in particular, they exposed how it was organized, how it was carried out, which where the roles and how the team worked together in collaboration. Then, they illustrated in details the planning of the developed code and its operation by explaining to the Computer Engineering Department of Cesena professors which were the challenges they faced and what technical solutions they chose and applied.
By applying the typical Problem Solving processes, pupils discovered the principles of computer science, acquired technological skills, but above all enhanced their cognitive and methodological skills.
Audience and Educational Framework
Educational Details
The students, divided into teams, caught the topic of fake news and carried out research to understand what it is.
With a careful research on the Internet, they identified the elements that distinguish a real news from a false one and decided to implement a project that could also serve other friends to understand that it is important to be careful to what you read on the web.
Project’s final animation plot 1: two boys meet at a shopping center in front of the school to go to a concert; when they arrive at their destination they find nothing and realize that they have fallen for fake news. The two boys provide peers with some useful tips and a small handbook to recognize false information.
Project’s final animation plot 2: Pinocchio, the prince of lies, enters the scene and he too understood he was wrong.
The programming includes changes of background and characters’ costumes, the dialogues are very simple, but the final animation result is well structured in time and content.
The problem solving, thanks to its metacognitive value, is configured as a gym for the ability of self-regulation since the pupils will be in a position to monitor the processes and evaluate their degrees of usefulness, necessity, appropriateness with the aim of identifying the solution , comparing the personal resolution procedures within the group, and will activate positive transfers of learning.
Through laboratory activities, students acquire cognitive flexibility that allows them to orient themselves in unpredictable and changing contexts, becoming "good thinkers", effective problem solvers and lifelong learners.
Through these experiences the student is able to:
- develop problem solving skills;
- develop IT skills (metacompetences) in the training process;
- develop algorithmic thinking as a general strategy for dealing with problems;
- explain the procedure followed, also in writing, while maintaining control over both the resolution process and the results;
- compare different procedures and produce formalizations that allow him to move from a specific problem to a class of problems;
- support one's convictions, bringing appropriate examples and counterexamples and using concatenations of affirmations; agrees to change opinion by recognizing the logical consequences of a correct argument;
- find satisfaction in learning and in demonstrating knowledge
Scratch programming language platform
Electronic devices: computer, smartphone, tablet
Implementation
(where and how the practice was implemented)
Educational material/resources (file/URL) accompanying the practice
Italian
Italian
English