CHAPTER 10: Collaborative Conceptual Change in the Computer-Science Classroom

The above episode was recorded while four students were collaborating on a learning activity aimed at classifying and discussing different recursive phenomena as part of a computer-science course dealing with recursion. Recursion is an interdisciplinary concept with many implications in programming (Hofstadter, 1979), or, as Harvey and Wright (1993) describe it, “recursion is the idea of selfreference applied to computer programs” (p. 168). Snowflakes like those that are presented in four levels of complexity in Figure 10.1 are among the most famous recursive phenomena that can be found outside of computer science. Participating in a collaborative-learning activity, the speaker was trying to draw the attention of her group-mates to a certain characteristic of a recursive phenomenon that she had just recognized. By lowering her voice, she also expressed–without words–a notion of “something getting gradually smaller.”