Leveraging Learners for Teaching Programming and Hardware Design at Scale

In a massive open online course (MOOC), a single pro-gramming or digital hardware design exercise may yield thousands of student solutions that vary in many ways, some superï¬ cial and some fundamental. Understanding large-scale variation in student solutions is a hard but important problem. For teachers, this variation can be a source of pedagogically valuable examples and expose corner cases not yet covered by autograding. For students, the variation in a large class means that other students may have struggled along a similar solution path, hit the same bugs, and can offer hints based on that earned expertise. We developed three systems to take advantage of the solu-tion variation in large classes, using program analysis and learnersourcing. All three systems have been evaluated using data or live deployments in on-campus or edX courses with thousands of students

Gamification’s efficacy in enhancing students' HTML programming skills and academic achievement motivation

This study aims to demonstrate the efficacy of gamification in developing HTML programming skills and academic achievement motivation for 10th-grade students. Despite the significance of computer programming in developing students' thinking, many students still need more motivation to learn it. One of the entertaining strategies of computer programming is gamification. The study used a quasi-experimental design for two groups. The experimental group (N=18) was taught by gamification and the control group (N=17) was taught by the traditional teaching method. The researcher conducted a pre-test to determine the equivalence between groups using a valid and reliable practical test and scale.  After three-weeks of teaching, the same test and scale were applied to compare the groups. The result showed statistical differences between the two groups in favor of the experimental group in programming skills and all academic achievement motivation dimensions. This study recommended that using gamification in teaching programming languages to students at different stages would help computer teachers.  More research should be conducted to investigate the impact of gamification on teaching different programming languages

Teaching Programming to 1,400 Business Students per year

If programming is the “Reading, Writing and Arithmetic” of the digital age, why do so few MIS programs teach programming to Business students in their intro to MIS course? While some schools have a cursory introduction to programming, very few dedicate over 1/3 of their intro to MIS courses to programming. This TREO talk is about sharing experiences teaching programming to Business students and teaching it at scale. At Temple University, roughly 1,400 Business students enroll in the introductory MIS course each academic year. The typical section size consists of 100-120 students and is taught synchronously both in-person and online. This course dedicates 5-1/2 weeks out of a 14-week semester to teaching Business students JavaScript programming. Most students don’t know what a variable is at the start of the programming content. We cover everything from variables to loops to interacting with HTML in this 5-1/2-week coursework component. This provides a launchpad for a deeper understanding of programming and a foundation for MIS majors and their upcoming MIS courses. Non-MIS majors develop a genuine understanding of what exactly a program is and what can be done with code. Implementation of the programming component of MIS2101 did not occur overnight. We started the process in deep discussions at the department and industry level to determine which programming language to introduce into the curriculum. JavaScript was ultimately selected, and we found a textbook that would support the goals and then developed the corresponding lecture/discussion material. We understood that introducing 1400 students to JavaScript alongside some of the instructors who had never taught programming before would be tricky, and we piloted the material in a small, Honors section of the introductory course. We invited the students to actively participate in the pilot program, requesting feedback along the way which enabled us to iterate our content too. What we discovered enabled us to expand the course to all sections the following semester. We learned that Activity-Based Learning would be the cornerstone of the experience. Each week, students were taught the basics of JavaScript and then put to work. Through hands on in class activities, students were writing “Hello World” in the text editor by the second day of class. Topics for Discussion include: 1. Teaching JavaScript at scale in terms of total number of students and large class sizes. 2. Teaching more than a cursory overview of programming to Business students. 3. Challenges for faculty who do not have a programming background. 4. Evaluating programming assignments at this scale. 5. Creating and administering programming exams at scale. We will discuss the challenges, lessons learned, and specific methods used implementing this initiative at this scale. We will discuss our solutions to these challenges and facilitate and exchange of ideas about other approaches to these kinds of issues

The Effect of Block Coding (Scratch) Activities Integrated into the 5E Learning Model in Science Teaching on Students’ Computational Thinking Skills and Programming Self-Efficacy

This study was carried out to determine the effect of Scratch-based coding applications integrated into the 5E learning model used in science teaching on students’ computational thinking skills and self-efficacy towards block-based programming. In addition, students’ perceptions of the activity were measured after each Scratch activity, which was applied at different stages of the course and with different difficulty. The study employed the pretest-posttest control group less design, one of the quasi-experimental methods. The study sample consist of 22 6th grade students attending a public school in Turkey located in a district center in the Eastern Black Sea region. The study was carried out in a five-week period in the 2022-2023 academic years. Computational thinking scale and robotics attitude scale, self-efficacy perception scale related to block-based programming and activity perception scale were used as data collection tools. The data were analyzed using the dependent samples t-test. The findings suggest that computational thinking skills level of students and their self-efficacy perception related to block-based programming increased significantly with the Scratch-based activities integrated into 5E learning model applied in science subjects. In addition, students have positive attitudes towards these activities. Thus, it is recommended to apply Scratch-based coding applications in teaching science subjects

Gender Differences in Middle School Students’ Attitudes and Self-Efficacy Perceptions towards mBlock Programming

This study aims to assess the effects of teaching programming with mBlock on self-efficacy perceptions and attitudes considering programming. Particularly, this study tries to research whether there is a gender difference in middle school students or not. The study was conducted in pre-test/post-test quasi experimental design. The participants of the study which was completed in twelve weeks were 82 middle school students. The data were collected through “Educational Computer Games Assisted Learning Coding Attitude Scale” and “Computer Programming Self-efficacy Scale”. The results of the research indicate that although the self-efficacy perceptions of boys towards programming were higher than the girls’ at the beginning of the research, this difference was closed at the end of the research. The results also show that teaching programming with mBlock to middle school students did not cause gender differences in self-efficacy perceptions and attitudes regarding programming. Although girls’ attitudes regarding programming were slightly higher than boys’, the difference was not considered to be significant. In addition, it was found that programming with mBlock significantly increased students' self-efficacy perceptions and attitudes towards programming. As a result, teaching programming with mBlock can provide similar possibilities for both genders in self-efficacy perceptions and attitudes regarding programming

How do early career teachers value different types of support? A scale-adjusted latent class choice model

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. Using a discrete choice experimental approach and associated Scale-Adjusted Latent Class Model (SALCM), we quantify the relative value early career teachers (ECTs) place on various types of support in the form of affirmation, resources, collegial opportunities, mentoring, and professional development. ECTs with intentions to depart the profession, place greater relative value on the sharing of resources, cooperative teaching and planning, offsite discussions about classroom management and programming with mentors, and having a greater professional voice. In contrast, those with intentions to remain, place greater value on observation from and conversations about teaching with more experienced teachers at their school

Foobaz: Variable Name Feedback for Student Code at Scale

Current traditional feedback methods, such as hand-grading student code for substance and style, are labor intensive and do not scale. We created a user interface that addresses feedback at scale for a particular and important aspect of code quality: variable names. We built this user interface on top of an existing back-end that distinguishes variables by their behavior in the program. Therefore our interface not only allows teachers to comment on poor variable names, they can comment on names that mislead the reader about the variable's role in the program. We ran two user studies in which 10 teachers and 6 students created and received feedback, respectively. The interface helped teachers give personalized variable name feedback on thousands of student solutions from an edX introductory programming MOOC. In the second study, students composed solutions to the same programming assignments and immediately received personalized quizzes composed by teachers in the previous user study.Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Amar Bose Teaching Fellowship)Quanta Computer (Firm) (Qmulus Project