A Case Study of Flipped Classroom for Automata Theory in Secondary Education

Theoretical Computer Science is hardly represented in schools and often comes as a surprise to students of Computer Science with its use of formal and mathematical notation. It might prove useful to broaden the view of Computer Science in schools to give them a more realistic view of what studying Computer Science is about. This paper reports on a course held in a german secondary education school where the flipped classroom method was used to teach basics of automata theory. Although the results of the final course exam were good and a short questionnaire filled out by the students suggests interest in the method the results from the teacher's perspective are mixed.