Debate as a learning activity for teaching programming: a case in the subject of machine learning

Abstract

Purpose

Debates are well known to encompass a variety of skills we would like higher education candidates to embody when they graduate.

Design/methodology/approach

Debates in a classroom with computer science as the main subject has been popular in high schools particularly with emerging issues around the area, however it does not have as an extensive similar documented outreach in tertiary education, particularly in the area of hard computer sciences and more recent concentrations of computer science, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

Findings

To explore further, the debate dataset had more methodologies applied and was split into training and testing sets, whose results were then compared by a standardized measure: Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) which is currently standard in the industry. The rationale of the approach is to quantify that debate activities have an immensely positive impact towards both the teaching and learning in technical subjects and needs to be more often and robustly used within higher education.

Originality/value

The rationale of the approach is that classroom debate activities equip students with verbal and social learning styles and an opportunity to engage with content in a way that is more comfortable than working with traditional lecture-and-laboratory style learning.

Citation

Gunasilan, U. (2022), "Debate as a learning activity for teaching programming: a case in the subject of machine learning", Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning, Vol. 12 No. 4, pp. 705-718. https://doi.org/10.1108/HESWBL-01-2021-0006