Seizing and retaining student interest in programming is a difficult task. Many students find programming to be a dry and tedious task doable only by students gifted with strong analytical skills. Teaching introductor...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450305006
Seizing and retaining student interest in programming is a difficult task. Many students find programming to be a dry and tedious task doable only by students gifted with strong analytical skills. Teaching introductory programming via creative writing begins by connecting the planning, organizing, and detailing of writing a story to the programming process. Creative concepts are taught first and then connected to an equivalent programming concept. Group-oriented activities using art, "Mad-Libs (TM)", "Potato Heads (TM)", and "Legos (TM)" allow students to actively make the connections among the creative concepts, analytical concepts, and programming skills. Students work in pairs. Student pairings are assigned by matching a student with analytical tendencies with a student majoring in one of the humanities disciplines. The pairs apply the concepts and skills by creating stories, designing an animation, and implementing the animation using the alice programming system. This research recognizes the creative nature of programming, invites students who would not consider studying programming to potentially identify an unrecognized talent, and attempts to develop a new approach for teaching introductory programming. This research and teaching is sponsored by a NSF Grant [11].
This study investigated the difficulties encountered by novice alice programmers. The researchers conducted one-on-one clinical interviews with 22 10th-grade students at a senior high school in Taipei, Taiwan. The par...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450326056
This study investigated the difficulties encountered by novice alice programmers. The researchers conducted one-on-one clinical interviews with 22 10th-grade students at a senior high school in Taipei, Taiwan. The participants were offered nine alice programming tasks, each requiring the use of a different set of programming constructs, which included objects, primitive methods, expressions, built-in functions, variables, conditional execution, repetition control, arrays, user-defined methods, and parameter passing. Each participant was observed closely as s/he worked through the given tasks. Whenever an impasse occurred while a student was trying to solve a problem, the observer would intervene by asking a sequence of questions with increasing specificity, ranging from strategic prompts to hints to provides, in order to determine the cause of the impasse. This study summarized the common difficulties for each of the alice programming constructs used by the participants in the programming tasks, and students' difficulties were categorized into four types: connection, location, usage, and math-and-other difficulties. Students having connection difficulties were unable to apply appropriate programming constructs to implement the actions required; location difficulties indicated students? inability to locating, in the alice interface, the programming constructs they needed; usage difficulties referred in general to semantic errors in a student's programs; whereas math-and-other difficulties were caused mainly by students' inadequate math knowledge. It is hoped that the findings of this research will help alice instructors to improve their students' performance by familiarizing themselves with the existence of the identified difficulties, and by addressing the missing conceptions or misconceptions underlying those difficulties.
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