Educational crowdsourcing to support the learning of computer programming

Technology has been used in the last three decades to support teaching and learning. However, educational software has frequently been under investigation to check the validity of their benefits. There is a demand for increasingly intelligent pedagogically-grounded computer technology. In this paper, we discuss adaptive, crowd sourced, and primarily educational technology; targeted at software development students. The proposed technology caters for either individual or group learning. It differentiates itself from other tutoring and programming support technologies as it will continually monitor and assess students’ performance in each phase of the educating process. It will also guide them in their learning through interactive feedback and adaptive curriculum delivery that suits both their current levels of learning and preferred learning styles. Keywords: Technology and Education; Coding; Teaching and Learning; Computer Programming; Adaptive Software

An Experience of Game-Based Learning in Web Applications Development Courses

Preparing graduates for working in the software engineering industry is challenging and requires effective learning frameworks and methodologies. More specifically, the challenge of teaching programming languages and paradigms is a very complex task that needs innovative educational tools. This paper presents a game-based educational tool named eLiza, developed and used to support the teaching and learning of programming languages and paradigms related to the development of web applications. eLiza was initially developed as a Moodle-based web application because Moodle is the educational eLearning platform used at the University of Valladolid, but as the use of mobile devices is constantly increasing, Android and iOS versions were created later in order to facilitate the access of the students to the games. This paper describes the main elements and the mechanics in playing eLiza. And it also describes an experience of its use in two engineering courses related to web programming applications development, offered to students in two different engineering study programs at the University of Valladolid, during the academic years 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. The great majority of the students, more than 75%, considered that the use of the eLiza game-based educational tool was positive to improve the teaching and learning process of the topics covered by the courses

Towards a Software Product Line Architecture to Build M-learning Applications for the Teaching of Programming

Software Product Line (SPL) is concerned with the sharing of common features within a family of products. It offers benefits, proven in several industry success cases. Regardless of its success, such a reuse-based development methodology has not been well explored in educational fields yet, as mobile platforms. In a different but related perspective, several initiatives have been undertaken as an attempt to improve the teaching of programming; however, no reuse approaches have been considered. In this paper we discuss the most significant approaches and methodologies for the conception of an SPL architecture according to the specificities of mobile devices and the teaching of programming. As main contributions, we highlight the identification of a set of approaches that support the conduction of the initial SPL processes, the design of a conceptual architecture model, and its qualitative evaluation with stakeholder

Teaching programming at a distance: the Internet software visualization laboratory

This paper describes recent developments in our approach to teaching computer programming in the context of a part-time Masters course taught at a distance. Within our course, students are sent a pack which contains integrated text, software and video course material, using a uniform graphical representation to tell a consistent story of how the programming language works. The students communicate with their tutors over the phone and through surface mail. Through our empirical studies and experience teaching the course we have identified four current problems: (i) students' difficulty mapping between the graphical representations used in the course and the programs to which they relate, (ii) the lack of a conversational context for tutor help provided over the telephone, (iii) helping students who due to their other commitments tend to study at 'unsociable' hours, and (iv) providing software for the constantly changing and expanding range of platforms and operating systems used by students. We hope to alleviate these problems through our Internet Software Visualization Laboratory (ISVL), which supports individual exploration, and both synchronous and asynchronous communication. As a single user, students are aided by the extra mappings provided between the graphical representations used in the course and their computer programs, overcoming the problems of the original notation. ISVL can also be used as a synchronous communication medium whereby one of the users (generally the tutor) can provide an annotated demonstration of a program and its execution, a far richer alternative to technical discussions over the telephone. Finally, ISVL can be used to support asynchronous communication, helping students who work at unsociable hours by allowing the tutor to prepare short educational movies for them to view when convenient. The ISVL environment runs on a conventional web browser and is therefore platform independent, has modest hardware and bandwidth requirements, and is easy to distribute and maintain. Our planned experiments with ISVL will allow us to investigate ways in which new technology can be most appropriately applied in the service of distance education

Website-Based E-Learning Management System Case Study at SDN Cijantung 02

The development of information technology is increasingly sophisticated not only as a communication tool, but is used as a medium to support teaching and learning activities, many educational institutions including elementary schools have implemented information technology in the learning process through the web, one of which is known as e-learning. E-learning is education that uses an electronic system that supports the development of teaching and learning activities with internet media or other computer network media. With the existence of e-learning, the teaching and learning process becomes simple where students and teachers do not have to meet face to face. The method used is data collection methods, namely observation, interview and literature study. In this study, a waterfall model is used, one of the models in the SDLC (System Development Life Cycle). This waterfall model includes several stages in software development, such as: Analysis, Design, Coding, Testing, and Maintenance. This system is built using the PHP programming language with PHPMyadmin as administrator and MySQL for the database. The results of this study can be used and applied to support teaching and learning activities and can facilitate teachers and students, besides that students can access subject matter doing assignments or exercises via the web anytime anywhere according to their needs

Contemporary developments in teaching and learning introductory programming: Towards a research proposal

The teaching and learning of introductory programming in tertiary institutions is problematic. Failure rates are high and the inability of students to complete small programming tasks at the completion of introductory units is not unusual. The literature on teaching programming contains many examples of changes in teaching strategies and curricula that have been implemented in an effort to reduce failure rates. This paper analyses contemporary research into the area, and summarises developments in the teaching of introductory programming. It also focuses on areas for future research which will potentially lead to improvements in both the teaching and learning of introductory programming. A graphical representation of the issues from the literature that are covered in the document is provided in the introduction

Integrating mobile robotics and vision with undergraduate computer science

This paper describes the integration of robotics education into an undergraduate Computer Science curriculum. The proposed approach delivers mobile robotics as well as covering the closely related field of Computer Vision, and is directly linked to the research conducted at the authors’ institution. The paper describes the most relevant details of the module content and assessment strategy, paying particular attention to the practical sessions using Rovio mobile robots. The specific choices are discussed that were made with regard to the mobile platform, software libraries and lab environment. The paper also presents a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of student results, including the correlation between student engagement and performance, and discusses the outcomes of this experience

A tool for helping operations research

This paper describes an integrated environment in which a student can acquire and test knowledge about Operations Research techniques. In this environment all the interactions with the users are performed by means of an appropriated graphical interface related to the problem and the algorithm chosen to solve it During a step-by-step problem solving session, the user makes the decisions and lets the system process the necessary computations. Moreover, this environment is able: (i) to check the correctness of the user's replies, (ii) to display warnings every time a wrong decision is taken, and (iii) to return to any previous step in order to give more flexibility to the teacher's exposition. The system is designed to include: Primal Simplex, Dual Simplex, Revised Simplex, Stepping-Stone Method for Transportation Problems, Hungarian Method for Assignment Problems, and Sensitivity Analysis