ne-Course for Learning Programming

Difficulties in learning programming are a constant concern in engineering courses. In many research studies involving the learning programming must of the solutions presented, from the beginning of the first programming languages, was to apply different type of problems analysis. Literature relating to the understanding of nature of learning programming skills has been focused explicitly on the teaching methodology and few of them focus on abilities, characteristics and knowledge acquired over the life cycle of learning programming in each student. Most of the students enrolled in engineering courses, where programming is a crucial competence, never had the opportunity to develop skills of computational thinking. In this paper, we focus our work on the learning programming developing and applying a set of exercises where students with more difficulties can express and develop their skills in computational thinking. In order to understand some programming students difficulties we have create a set of exercises, and apply it to a pre-programming course, that allows teachers to understand how students analyse and comprehend aspects such as visualization, spatial interpretation and physical manipulation. This paper also reports on results obtained from a class experiment where Memory Transfer Language was used by students to learn programming. All the exercises must be resolved without any type of technology, designed as a ne-course (no electronic course) for learning programming

ne-Course for Learning Programming

Difficulties in learning programming are a constant concern in engineering courses. In many research studies involving the learning programming must of the solutions presented, from the beginning of the first programming languages, was to apply different type of problems analysis. Literature relating to the understanding of nature of learning programming skills has been focused explicitly on the teaching methodology and few of them focus on abilities, characteristics and knowledge acquired over the life cycle of learning programming in each student. Most of the students enrolled in engineering courses, where programming is a crucial competence, never had the opportunity to develop skills of computational thinking. In this paper, we focus our work on the learning programming developing and applying a set of exercises where students with more difficulties can express and develop their skills in computational thinking. In order to understand some programming students difficulties we have create a set of exercises, and apply it to a pre-programming course, that allows teachers to understand how students analyse and comprehend aspects such as visualization, spatial interpretation and physical manipulation. This paper also reports on results obtained from a class experiment where Memory Transfer Language was used by students to learn programming. All the exercises must be resolved without any type of technology, designed as a ne-course (no electronic course) for learning programming

Incorporating the Virtual Programming Lab into a First Year Computer Science Module

For many students attending third level, Computer Science is a new discipline. As part of their first year students will undertake a module in programming. Computer Science has a notoriously high failure rate at the end of first year with programming modules seen as a major stumbling block. Programming is an individual task and one which can be very frustrating with struggling students feeling isolated and often embarrassed to ask questions. For novice programmers feedback from traditional Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) can be demoralising with potentially numerous errors frustrating students. Feedback from these IDEs tends to be high level and confusing for novice programmers. The aim of this case study was to provide automated real-time feedback and grading to students in their introductory programming module. This feedback system would be available to the students in their weekly labs and also when they are doing self-directed study. The automated system used was the Virtual Programming Lab (VPL) which allows for tailored feedback that gives an automatic grade even if a program does not compile

Every child a coder?: research challenges for a 5--18 programming curriculum

The current drive in many countries to teach computing, particularly programming, to all from an early age, has potential to empower and support children in creative and problem-solving tasks. However, there are a number of challenges in ensuring that computing curricula, tools and environments embody appropriate progression and engender motivation for the topic across the school years. This workshop will consider the key research challenges in learning coding throughout childhood, with contributions from developmental psychologists, educators, researchers of children's programming, and designers of developmentally appropriate technologies for children

Short pauses while studying considered harmful

Peer reviewe

Teaching Introductory Programming Online: Lessons Learned

Programming is considered a fundamental skill for Information Systems students. Yet, it is generally regarded as hard for students to learn and challenging for instructors to teach. Fully online programming courses can make it even more challenging than the face-to-face version. In this paper, we share our experience of taking a multi-faceted approach in teaching an introductory programming course online. We discuss pedagogical considerations in our approach that incorporates best practices with experimentation to be suitable for our student body while achieving desired learning outcomes

Utilising pair programming to enhance the performance of slow-paced students on introductory programming

Due to its high failure rate, Introductory Programming has become a main concern. One of the main issues is the incapability of slow-paced students to cope up with given programming materials. This paper proposes a learning technique which utilises pair programming to help slow-paced students on Introductory Programming; each slow-paced student is paired with a fast-paced student and the latter is encouraged to teach the former as a part of grading system. An evaluation regarding that technique has been conducted on three undergraduate classes from an Indonesian university for the second semester of 2018. According to the evaluation, the use of pair programming may help both slow-paced and fast-paced students. Nevertheless, it may not significantly affect individual academic performancePeer Reviewe

APPLICATION OF GAMIFICATION IN INTRODUCTION TO PROGRAMMING: A CASE STUDY

Institution of higher educations has struggled to provide engaging method to learn programming although effort has been made by educators but often with limited success. The question is how best to teach introductory to programming for novices students is often not addressed properly. This is because learning programming for college students especially for new learners in programming present many challenges such as subject difficulty, lack of motivation in doing exercises, passiveness in class and diversity of student abilities. Since students often faced a lot of difficulties when learning introductory of programming, gamification has the potential to provide a way to promote students’ motivation and engagement while also providing feedback on the students’ level of competency of the learned material. Gamification is the process of incorporating game elements into education in an effort to increase student engagement.Thus, there appears to be a good fit between introductory of programming and gamification. Taking these elements into consideration, this paper seeks to apply the concept of gamification to semester 1 students taking Java Programming as the first level of programming subject.  Some best practices in gamification such as competitions, incorporating engaging games elements, scoring using rewards and levels, badges, providing feedback, and providing homework to encourage informal learning are going to be applied. Finally, several popular online applications such as Kahoot, Online Crossword Puzzle and Online Quiz were also designed to see the impact on these gamification tools towards learning of students. The game would be designed to have 3 levels that increase in difficulties with competition as a core element to increase student’s engagement. This paper would also seeks to design the  user evaluation form that can be  used to  determine the effects of applying gamification on the student’s engagement, motivation level, and understanding of the topic in introductory programming subject. Through the research findings it could provide a platform in formulating alternative ways besides the traditional teaching method for educators in creating educational programming games and applying it to teach novices in introductory programming subjects.&nbsp

Web-Based Collaborative Learning in CS1: A Study on Outcomes of Peer Code Review

Based on a teacher-organized student-to-student code review session, we gathered both quantitative and qualitative data from 177 first-semester Information Technology undergraduate students to learn about their thoughts, experiences and outcomes from collaborative learning through an online tool in an introductory programming course. The students were given a programming exercise to solve using JavaScript in a Web-based IDE facilitating real time code sharing for peerevaluation of code based on five provided evaluation criteria: naming of artifacts in the code, formatting of code, use of data types, use of execution flow, and other comments. In the survey questionnaire, we employed a five-point Likert scale with an additional text field for qualitative feedback. For the qualitative free-text based answers, thematic coding was carried out to identify recurring themes and topics in the students’ answers. Based on the students’ feedback, our results indicate that the majority of the participants had positive experiences resulting in self-reported learning through collaborative work, peer-evaluation and problem solving