Training programming to prospective IT teachers: tasks with a spiral-increasing complexity

This paper discusses one of the urgent problems of prospective IT teachers’ training – the development of a special competence: the ability to use the programming methodology for solving tasks of the school «Computer Science» course. In contrast to the classical approach in teaching methods, when each topic under the section «Programming» is fixed by the solution of a number of simple tasks, we propose to solve problems with spirally increasing complexity (such tasks will be understood as large projects, the implementation of which can be improved throughout the study of the programming course, while at each stage the result of the work will be a full-fledged workable program). Any «round» of the solution, except for the first one, can be omitted without loss of functionality, and each block of the task can be independently evaluated by students. The paper provides an example of such a problem, describes in detail the stages of its solution, as well as the evaluation system. This technique has been tested at Samara State University of Social Sciences and Education with the students majoring in 44.03.01 Pedagogical Education («Computer Science»). The proposed method has shown good results both in the field of motivation and in terms of learning.