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

Mobile App Design for Teaching and Learning: Educators’ Experiences in an Online Graduate Course

This research explored how educators with limited programming experiences learned to design mobile apps through peer support and instructor guidance. Educators were positive about the sense of community in this online course. They also considered App Inventor a great web-based visual programming tool for developing useful and fully functioning mobile apps. They had great sense of empowerment through developing unique apps by using App Inventor. They felt their own design work and creative problem solving were inspired by the customized mobile apps shared by peers. The learning activities, including sharing customized apps, providing peer feedback, composing design proposals, and keeping design journals (blogging), complemented each other to support a positive sense of community and form a strong virtual community of learning mobile app design. This study helped reveal the educational value of mobile app design activities and the web-based visual programming tool, and the possibility of teaching/learning mobile app design online. The findings can also encourage educators to explore and experiment on the potential of incorporating these design learning activities in their respective settings, and to develop mobile apps for their diverse needs in teaching and learning

Exploring student perceptions about the use of visual programming environments, their relation to student learning styles and their impact on student motivation in undergraduate introductory programming modules

My research aims to explore how students perceive the usability and enjoyment of visual/block-based programming environments (VPEs), to what extent their learning styles relate to these perceptions and finally to what extent these tools facilitate student understanding of basic programming constructs and impact their motivation to learn programming

Block-Based Development of Mobile Learning Experiences for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things enables experts of given domains to create smart user experiences for interacting with the environment. However, development of such experiences requires strong programming skills, which are challenging to develop for non-technical users. This paper presents several extensions to the block-based programming language used in App Inventor to make the creation of mobile apps for smart learning experiences less challenging. Such apps are used to process and graphically represent data streams from sensors by applying map-reduce operations. A workshop with students without previous experience with Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile app programming was conducted to evaluate the propositions. As a result, students were able to create small IoT apps that ingest, process and visually represent data in a simpler form as using App Inventor's standard features. Besides, an experimental study was carried out in a mobile app development course with academics of diverse disciplines. Results showed it was faster and easier for novice programmers to develop the proposed app using new stream processing blocks.Spanish National Research Agency (AEI) - ERDF fund

The use of laptop computers in programming lectures

This research explores the effect of the use of laptop computers on students&rsquo; learning experiences during lectures. Our methodology involves embedding laptops with visualization software as a learning aid during lectures. We then employ a framework of seven principles of good practice in higher education to evaluate the impact of the use of laptop computers on the learning experience of computer programming students. Overall, we found that students were highly motivated and supportive of this innovative use of laptop computers with lectures.<br /

Human Factors in Agile Software Development

Through our four years experiments on students' Scrum based agile software development (ASD) process, we have gained deep understanding into the human factors of agile methodology. We designed an agile project management tool - the HASE collaboration development platform to support more than 400 students self-organized into 80 teams to practice ASD. In this thesis, Based on our experiments, simulations and analysis, we contributed a series of solutions and insights in this researches, including 1) a Goal Net based method to enhance goal and requirement management for ASD process, 2) a novel Simple Multi-Agent Real-Time (SMART) approach to enhance intelligent task allocation for ASD process, 3) a Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) based method to enhance emotion and morale management for ASD process, 4) the first large scale in-depth empirical insights on human factors in ASD process which have not yet been well studied by existing research, and 5) the first to identify ASD process as a human-computation system that exploit human efforts to perform tasks that computers are not good at solving. On the other hand, computers can assist human decision making in the ASD process.Comment: Book Draf

Augmented reality mobile app development for all

Lack of programming skills is a barrier to the engagement of teachers in the development and customisation of their own applications. Visual Environment for Designing Interactive Learning Scenarios (VEDILS), a visual tool for designing, customising and deploying learning technologies, provides teachers with a development environment with a low entry threshold. Current mobile devices are equipped with sensors and have sufficient processing power to use augmented reality technologies. Despite the heavy use of mobile devices in students’ lives, the use of augmented reality mobile applications as learning tools is not widespread among teachers. The current work presents a framework comprising the development tool and a method for designing and deploying learning activities. It focuses on the augmented reality components of the authoring tools, which allow users to create their own mobile augmented reality learning apps. It also present the results of the evaluation of the framework with 47 third-level educators, and two case studies of classroom implementations of mobile augmented reality apps developed by these educators. The results illustrate the suitability of the framework and authoring tool for supporting users without programming skills in developing their own apps

Transitions in teacher education and professional identities: proceedings

The University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, was the host for the 2014 Annual Conference of the Association for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE), which took place in August, from the 25th to the 27th. The Conference focused on Transitions in Teacher Education and Professional Identities looked at the transitions in teacher education and analysed different experiences in professional identity of (student) teachers from an international perspective. Three keywords may be identified: challenges in teaching, dilemmas in teacher education and in teacher educators’ role and current trends that are shaping teacher education in different contexts. Similar dilemmas and even contradictions have been identified in different settings with different modes of government intervention in teacher education in which content, structure and duration are also diverse but with similar features. Another key theme discussed at the Conference was the complexity of the concept of identity and also the contested nature of the transitions: transitions for what? How? Why? These transitions and shifts in teacher education and professional identities need to be examined within the context of current policies but also in the light of the complexities and contradictions of teaching as a profession. Teacher educators are also facing transitions in teacher education curricula but also regarding their own identities. These are complex processes that may include resistance and turbulence because transitions may be troublesome for many reasons. In this regard context and language matter but also the kinds of policies and practices that exist within teacher education. There are questions that remain unanswered. However, despite the differences, the dilemmas, and even the contradictions, teacher education can make a difference in professional identity development as was the case of successful experiences that have been described in the Conference