The Flipped Classroom

The flipped classroom has been gaining popularity in recent years. In theory, flipping the classroom appears sound: passive learning activities such as unidirectional lectures are pushed to outside class hours in the form of videos, and precious class time is spent on active learning activities. Yet the courses for information systems (IS) undergraduates at the university that the author is teaching at are still conducted in the traditional lecture-in-class, homework-after-class style. In order to increase students’ engagement with the course content and to improve their experience with the course, the author implemented a trial of the flipped classroom model for a programming course with pair programming as the predominant in-class active learning activity. Student feedback on this pedagogy was generally very positive with many respondents considering it effective and helpful for learning. One of the biggest advantages mentioned by students is that they had the option to watch each video lecture as many times as required to be prepared for class. The author also observed that students were more engaged and empowered to take on more ownership for their learning. He recommends that other instructors consider rolling out their own trials of the flipped classroom incrementally for courses that would benefit the most from this pedagogy

Turning engineers into reflective university teachers

Increasing attention to quality and innovation in Higher Education (HE) is enhancing the pedagogic knowledge of faculty members and thereby encouraging the academic success of their students. This aim requires, from the institution and teachers, a greater degree of involvement than was previously the case. This is certainly borne out by experience in Portuguese universities. The growing concern of engineers with issues of pedagogy and academic success marks a sea change in the traditional conceptions of teaching and learning in Higher Education. There are, of course, indications that many academics are resistant to change. Our research indicates a tradition among Portuguese and Scottish academics to incline their effort toward research with a resultant decline in interest and effort on teaching. The present paper presents a meta-analysis of research conducted at the University of Aveiro (Portugal) and the University of Strathclyde (United Kingdom) between 2000 and 2004 involving academics who taught first-year introductory Programming courses. The purpose of our study was to promote reflection and research on teaching based issues as a strategy toward improved student learning. The findings of the study raised a number of salient issues for discussion and consideration. In this paper, we present some of these issues, aiming to explore the impact that the findings may have on teachers' attitudes towards teaching and students' learning in introductory programming courses

Effects of Automated Interventions in Programming Assignments: Evidence from a Field Experiment

A typical problem in MOOCs is the missing opportunity for course conductors to individually support students in overcoming their problems and misconceptions. This paper presents the results of automatically intervening on struggling students during programming exercises and offering peer feedback and tailored bonus exercises. To improve learning success, we do not want to abolish instructionally desired trial and error but reduce extensive struggle and demotivation. Therefore, we developed adaptive automatic just-in-time interventions to encourage students to ask for help if they require considerably more than average working time to solve an exercise. Additionally, we offered students bonus exercises tailored for their individual weaknesses. The approach was evaluated within a live course with over 5,000 active students via a survey and metrics gathered alongside. Results show that we can increase the call outs for help by up to 66% and lower the dwelling time until issuing action. Learnings from the experiments can further be used to pinpoint course material to be improved and tailor content to be audience specific.Comment: 10 page

Computing as the 4th “R”: a general education approach to computing education

Computing and computation are increasingly pervading our lives, careers, and societies - a change driving interest in computing education at the secondary level. But what should define a "general education" computing course at this level? That is, what would you want every person to know, assuming they never take another computing course? We identify possible outcomes for such a course through the experience of designing and implementing a general education university course utilizing best-practice pedagogies. Though we nominally taught programming, the design of the course led students to report gaining core, transferable skills and the confidence to employ them in their future. We discuss how various aspects of the course likely contributed to these gains. Finally, we encourage the community to embrace the challenge of teaching general education computing in contrast to and in conjunction with existing curricula designed primarily to interest students in the field

Instructional strategies and tactics for the design of introductory computer programming courses in high school

This article offers an examination of instructional strategies and tactics for the design of introductory computer programming courses in high school. We distinguish the Expert, Spiral and Reading approach as groups of instructional strategies that mainly differ in their general design plan to control students' processing load. In order, they emphasize topdown program design, incremental learning, and program modification and amplification. In contrast, tactics are specific design plans that prescribe methods to reach desired learning outcomes under given circumstances. Based on ACT* (Anderson, 1983) and relevant research, we distinguish between declarative and procedural instruction and present six tactics which can be used both to design courses and to evaluate strategies. Three tactics for declarative instruction involve concrete computer models, programming plans and design diagrams; three tactics for procedural instruction involve worked-out examples, practice of basic cognitive skills and task variation. In our evaluation of groups of instructional strategies, the Reading approach has been found to be superior to the Expert and Spiral approaches

Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming. This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research