Applying techniques from foreign language teaching to computer science

As increasingly large numbers of students enter higher education, it is necessary to rethink teaching strategies and the allocation of resources to cope with class sizes that are well over the three figure mark. In the Division of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire we have been investigating methods and techniques that are used to teach foreign languages to school children in order to see if these can be adapted to teach computer languages to students. This paper first lists the criteria that we established as essential for a useful teaching technique, and then describes our experiences in using a variation of Information Gap (a technique used in schools for teaching French) to teach the Z specification language to students.