Effects of Blended Class on “History of Computers” with Peer Assessment for an Assignment to Introduce a Historical Character

Isao Miyaji 
(Faculty of Informatics, Okayama University of Science, Japan)

Abstract: In the class of learning the “History of Computers”, slides were distributed to students as written materials, and lectures were given according to the slides. At the end of the lesson, students were requested to describe the flow of history and a mini-examination then was conducted. As an assignment, students investigated a historical character in computer history and made a presentation slides to introduce it in the form of a report. E-learning that allows lecture-slide learning was made available so that students were able to perform preparation and review in addition to the lesson. Students were requested to browse and mutually evaluate their assignment in a PowerPoint. Additionally, students who scored highly in the evaluation were requested to give a presentation for the characters they investigated. At that time, the other students were requested to describe points to improve the reports whose presentation were made. In these manner, blended learning was performed by introducing numerous interactions among students. At the beginning and end of this lesson, the degree of term recognition and consciousness learned during the lesson were checked. It was identified that the students’ amount of knowledge was increased and that awareness was improved. This paper reports these findings.

Key words: history of computers, recognition degree of terms, consciousness related to ability, blended learning, peer assessment