A Perspective Of Automated Programming Error Feedback Approaches In Problem Solving Exercises

Programming tools are meant for student to practice programming. Automated programming error feedback will be provided for students to self-construct the knowledge through their own experience. This paper has clustered current approaches in providing automated error programming feedback to the students during problem solving exercises. These include additional syntax error messages, solution template mismatches, test data comparison, assisted agent report and collaborative comment feedback. The study is conducted based on published papers for last two decades. The trends are analyzed to get the overview of latest research contributions towards eliminating programming difficulties among students. The result shows that future direction of automated programming error feedback approaches may combine agent and collaborative feedback approaches towards more interactive, dynamic, end-user oriented and specific goal oriented. Such future direction may help other researchers fill in the gap on new ways of assisting learners to better understand feedback messages provided by automated assessment tool

School Budgets and Student Achievement in California: The Principal's Perspective

Presents the results of workshops conducted with 45 elementary, middle, and high school principals from California public schools. Documents the variety of resource allocation strategies used by principals to maximize student academic performance

PLMan: A Game-Based Learning Activity for Teaching Logic Thinking and Programming

This paper presents PLMan, a game-based learning activity designed to face problems observed in practical lessons about Computational Logics. The main of these problems was unmotivated students, who were showing lack of interest in learning activities. Other problems were a high percentage of students abandoning or committing plagiarism, and teachers' overload, that was leaving no time for re-designing lessons, activities and workflow. This paper describes analyses and design steps undertaken from the problematic situation to the implementation of PLMan. Experimental data confirms that this intervention reverted the problematic situation, improved learning results, raised student motivation and involvement, and left time for teachers to maintain and improve the system. Results clearly show that students have moved from literally hating activities to enjoying them and being enthusiast on participating beyond lessons

Game-Based Learning, Gamification in Education and Serious Games

The aim of this book is to present and discuss new advances in serious games to show how they could enhance the effectiveness and outreach of education, advertising, social awareness, health, policies, etc. We present their use in structured learning activities, not only with a focus on game-based learning, but also on the use of game elements and game design techniques to gamify the learning process. The published contributions really demonstrate the wide scope of application of game-based approaches in terms of purpose, target groups, technologies and domains and one aspect they have in common is that they provide evidence of how effective serious games, game-based learning and gamification can be

Teacher's guide book for primary and secondary school

There is an urgent need for collective action to mitigate the consequences of climate change and adapt to unavoidable changes. The complexity of climate change issues can pose educational challenges. Nonetheless, education has a key role to play in ensuring that younger generations have the required knowledge and skills to understand issues surrounding climate change, to avoid despair, to take action, and to be prepared to live in a changing world. The Office for Climate Education (OCE) was founded in 2018 to promote strong international cooperation between scientific organisations, educational institutions and NGOs. The overall aim of the OCE is to ensure that the younger generations of today and tomorrow are educated about climate change. Teachers have a key role to play in their climate education and it is essential that they receive sufficient support to enable them to implement effective lessons on climate change. The OCE has developed a range of educational resources and professional development modules to support them in teaching about climate change with active pedagogy

Exploring students’ iterative practices when learning with physical computing kits through data visualisations

Physical computing kits allow the practical implementation of open-ended, hands-on, interactive learning experiences in the classroom. In the process of engaging with physical computing kits, students formulate and implement self-constructed goals using an iterative approach. However, the openness and diversity of such learning contexts often make them challenging to design and support. The field of learning analytics has the potential to support project-based learning, using continuous real-time data traces arising from student interactions. Data visualisations, specifically, can provide reflective opportunities for teachers to analyse students’ actions and act based on this evidence. However, to date, there has been little data visualisation research targeted at learning with physical computing kits. This thesis reports progress into the design and evaluation of a suite of data visualisations focussed on students’ iterative design process when using physical computing kits in authentic classroom settings. The areas of iterative design, appropriation theory, process-driven learning analytics and data visualisation inform the analysis and interpretation of trace data collected from students’ interactions. The contribution of the thesis is three-fold. First, a model for examining students’ trace data in keeping with social processes, such as appropriation, is presented. Secondly, insights into the iterative design process of students engaging in open-ended projects are produced, as they emerge from our data visualisations, across multiple groups of students. Thirdly, an evaluation into the role and potential of using data visualisations in the classroom is conducted with ten teachers. Implications for the design and support of open-ended project-based learning experiences with physical computing kits using trace data and data visualisation are discussed based on the teachers’ feedback. The thesis represents a first step towards the design of context-aligned, process-oriented data visualisations to provide evidence-based reflective opportunities to support students’ iterative design behaviours in this learning setting

Analysis of the use of automatic judges in computer programming classes in vocational education

The goal of this thesis is to analyse the use of automatic judges in the teaching of Computer Programming in Vocational Training programs, in a sample of secondary schools in Catalonia and Spain. We review the academic literature on automatic judges and describe their history and the different services that are currently available. Through surveys to teachers and students from Vocational Training centres, we have collected information about the tools in use. We classify twelve of them according to features that we found to be relevant to the teachers we surveyed. Using the collected data, we study the reasons in favour and against automatic judges, as well as the level of familiarity of active teachers with those tools. We identify some discrepancies between teacher's expectations and actual experiences of teachers who have adopted them. We use students' responses to derive statistics about their satisfaction, and to detect differences in the attitude of those who use judges in class and those who don't with respect to the subject of programming. In order to detect any effects on learning, we use three Bebras challenges to evaluate the competence of algorithmic and computational thinking. No difference in the ability of students to complete these challenges has been observed, but a difference in how willing they are to work on them has been detected. The effect is contrary to the one originally hypothesised, which leads to some interesting questions for further study