The educational materials available to learn block-based programming usually promote a learning process which is more intuitive tan deep. In this paper, we present two educational materials designed to support deep le...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9798350376623;9798350376616
The educational materials available to learn block-based programming usually promote a learning process which is more intuitive tan deep. In this paper, we present two educational materials designed to support deep learning of the ScratchJr programming language. On the one hand, we present the operational semantics of the language as rules of program behavior. On the other hand, we present a set of programming patterns to support coding characters' actions. Both materials were evaluated by pre-service teachers ( novice learners of programming) and university teachers (who teach ScratchJr). Their assessments scored the materials very positively and allowed improving their written statements.
Learning to recognize and apply programming patterns — reusable abstractions of code — is critical to becoming a proficient computer scientist. However, many introductory Computer Science courses do not teach patter...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450380966
Learning to recognize and apply programming patterns — reusable abstractions of code — is critical to becoming a proficient computer scientist. However, many introductory Computer Science courses do not teach patterns, in part because teaching these concepts requires significant curriculum changes. As an alternative, we explore how a novel user interface for practicing coding — Faded Parsons Problems — can support introductory Computer Science students in learning to apply programming patterns. We ran a classroom-based study with 237 students which found that Faded Parsons Problems, or rearranging and completing partially blank lines of code into a valid program, are an effective exercise interface for teaching programming patterns, significantly surpassing the performance of the more standard approaches of code writing and code tracing exercises. Faded Parsons Problems also improve overall code writing ability at a comparable level to code writing exercises, but are preferred by students.
Many implied programming patterns are contained in large-scale software. Most of the implied programming patterns are missing proper documentation. Defects would be brought into the software, if any of the patterns is...
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Many implied programming patterns are contained in large-scale software. Most of the implied programming patterns are missing proper documentation. Defects would be brought into the software, if any of the patterns is violated by programmers. To alleviate this problem, many works are proposed to find defects by mining programming patterns from the software. However, a great many of candidate patterns and defects are reported by these approaches. These patterns and defects need to be manually confirmed, and the applicability and scalability of these approaches are restricted by this problem. In view of this problem, this paper proposes an approach to automated mining, confirming, filtering function call sequence patterns (FCSPs), and detecting defects which violate the patterns. At first, FCSPs are mined from a previous stable version and an update version under analyzing, respectively;then, the FCSPs are confirmed by analyzing correlations;after that, useful FCSPs are filtered with respect to the FCSPs mined from the previous version;finally, the version under analyzing is scanned for suspicious defects against the filtered FCSPs. 3 open source projects are selected as the experimental subjects to evaluate the approach. As the experimental result shows, the efficiency of defect detection is improved by the proposed approach. It confirms programming candidate FCSPs with 82% F1-measure and 77% accuracy, and eliminates 55% suspicious defects without sacrificing the performance.
There is still no pedagogy to teach programming that stands out significantly from others and no consensus on what is the best way for learning programming. There is still a need to develop new teaching methods for le...
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There is still no pedagogy to teach programming that stands out significantly from others and no consensus on what is the best way for learning programming. There is still a need to develop new teaching methods for learning in introductory programming courses. This paper presents a pedagogic approach in support of creativity in programming and the results of a successful case study, where the teacher facilitates the learning of programming patterns by means of students' involvement in game creation. The results show an improvement in motivation and learning introductory programming, when we combine programming patterns with games using concrete materials.
Usability is a software system quality attribute. There are usability issues that have an impact not only on the user interface but also on the core functionality of applications. In this paper, three web applications...
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Usability is a software system quality attribute. There are usability issues that have an impact not only on the user interface but also on the core functionality of applications. In this paper, three web applications were developed to discover patterns for implementing two usability functionalities with an impact on core functionality: Abort Operation and Progress Feedback. We applied an inductive process in order to identify reusable elements to implement the selected functionalities. For communication purposes, these elements are specified as design and programming patterns (PHP, *** and Java). Another two web applications were developed in order to evaluate the patterns. The evaluation explores several issues such as ease of pattern understanding and ease of pattern use, as well as the final result of the applications. We found that it is feasible to reuse the identified solutions specified as patterns. The results also show that usability functionalities have features, like the level of coupling with the application or the complexity of each component of the solution, that simplify or complicate their implementation. In this case, the Abort Operation functionality turned out to be more feasible to implement than the Progress Feedback functionality. (c) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
When learning to program, different types of knowledge and skills have to be built: syntactic knowledge, i.e., knowledge of the language features; conceptual knowledge, i.e., knowledge of the semantics of the various ...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450370929
When learning to program, different types of knowledge and skills have to be built: syntactic knowledge, i.e., knowledge of the language features; conceptual knowledge, i.e., knowledge of the semantics of the various constructs; strategic knowledge, i.e. the ability to use syntactic and conceptual knowledge in the most appropriate and effective way to solve programming problems. Strategic knowledge also includes the ability to exploit and combine solutions to known problems to solve new ones and is one of the hardest skills to acquire when learning to programm [5, 6, 11]. Terms such as goals[10] patterns [5, 6, 11]. schema,[9] strategies[4], and variables' roles[3] have been used to refer to this kind of knowledge. Several authors suggest that strategic knowledge should be taught explicitly, however there are three main issues to address: plans/patterns/schema are used sometimes interchangeably and sometimes similarly but not correspondingly; it is claimed that a small number of plans/patterns is needed in an introductory programming course, however there is no agreed upon inventory of plans/patterns among the CS community;the notion of variables' roles isn't always explicitly linked to the notion of plans/patterns;little instructional material is available that explicitly teaches strategies, and it is neither easy nor obvious how to design such material. The aim of this study is to investigate whether and how such notions of plans/patterns/schema and variables' roles can be integrated into introductory programming *** idea is to establish a framework that includes and arranges the different definitions presented in literature. The framework developed will be used for building a catalogue of plans/pattern and variables' roles encountered in CS1 practice, in CS1 assessment, and in the literature on introductory programming; this catalogue will be the basis for designing new instructional/learning material for fostering strategic knowledge. The developed mater
Background and Context: A major difference between expert and novice programmers is the ability to recognize and apply common and meaningful patterns in code. Previous works have attempted to identify these patterns a...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9798400704758
Background and Context: A major difference between expert and novice programmers is the ability to recognize and apply common and meaningful patterns in code. Previous works have attempted to identify these patterns as programming plans, such as counting or filtering the items of a collection. However, these efforts primarily relied on expert opinions and yielded many varied sets of plans. No methods have been applied to evaluate these various programming plans as far as their alignment with novices' cognitive development. Objectives: In this work, we investigate which programming plans are learned as discrete skills. To this end, we evaluate how well students transfer their knowledge between problems that test a particular plan. Further, we explore how plan definitions can be improved to better represent student cognition using historical data on student performance collected from a programming course. Method: We apply learning curve analysis, a method for modeling student improvement on problems that test a particular skill, using programming plans as a skill model. More specifically, we study student submissions on code-writing exercises in Python from a CS1 class for non-majors that includes many small programming problems as well as implicit and explicit instruction on patterns. We compare the learning curves for ten programming plans across seven semesters of the same course. Findings: Students develop the skill of using some programming plans in their solutions, indicated by consistent declines in error rates on practice opportunities for a subset of plans in multiple semesters with various conditions. Most consistently learned plans have clear and concrete goals that can be explained in natural language, as opposed to having abstract definitions or being explained in terms of language structures. Implications: We show that learning curve analysis can be used to empirically assess the cognitive validity of proposed programming plans, as well as compare variou
The teaching and assessment of introductory programming involves writing code that solves a problem described by text. Previous research found that OpenAI's Codex, a natural language machine learning model trained...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450394314
The teaching and assessment of introductory programming involves writing code that solves a problem described by text. Previous research found that OpenAI's Codex, a natural language machine learning model trained on billions of lines of code, performs well on many programming problems, often generating correct and readable Python code. GitHub's version of Codex, Copilot, is freely available to students. This raises pedagogic and academic integrity concerns. Educators need to know what Copilot is capable of, in order to adapt their teaching to AI-powered programming assistants. Previous research evaluated the most performant Codex model quantitatively, e.g. how many problems have at least one correct suggestion that passes all tests. Here I evaluate Copilot instead, to see if and how it differs from Codex, and look qualitatively at the generated suggestions, to understand the limitations of Copilot. I also report on the experience of using Copilot for other activities asked of students in programming courses: explaining code, generating tests and fixing bugs. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the observed capabilities for the teaching of programming.
A central topic to computer science education is the training of novice programmers. Novice programming skills have already been mapped to hierarchical levels, and expert programming skills have been measured based on...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781728117645
A central topic to computer science education is the training of novice programmers. Novice programming skills have already been mapped to hierarchical levels, and expert programming skills have been measured based on task performance. But didactical instructions and individual support to acquire expert programming skills have not been provided in detail. I propose the investigation of structural and semantic patterns in program construction sequences in an IDE-based learning analytics setting. I aim to provide a more fine-grained assessment of programming skills, to enable skill assessments during programming tasks, and to support the individual acquisition of programming skills.
Pupils are often first exposed to programming in block-based programming environments like Scratch. Identifying and measuring the previous experience of students learning to program is a key to improve the teaching of...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781728117645
Pupils are often first exposed to programming in block-based programming environments like Scratch. Identifying and measuring the previous experience of students learning to program is a key to improve the teaching of programming. In this contribution, we outline an approach to measure and evaluate programming interactions with the block-based programming environment Scratch. First results, obtained with eight upper secondary school students, show that programming skills and patterns can be quantified with interaction metrics measured during program construction. The aim is a more fine-grained identification and assessment of programming skills.
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