The present study aimed to investigate primary school students' achievement in programming concepts after 6-month learning of Scratch programming and 6-month learning of App Inventor programming. A test of program...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781912764419
The present study aimed to investigate primary school students' achievement in programming concepts after 6-month learning of Scratch programming and 6-month learning of App Inventor programming. A test of programming concepts was developed based on the evidence-centered approach to assess students' progression. Online tests were administered to 1678 grade-5 students in class with the help of teachers. Students were given 30 minutes for each test before and after the programming course. based on partial matrix sampling method, three test forms were created with 5 common anchoring items to reduce students' burden of completing the full test form developed for this study. The unidimensional dichotomous Rasch model was therefore employed for calculating students' ability scores. Results suggested that the test is valid for measuring programming concepts according to the mean-square fit statistics and other fit indices. Paired sample t-test was conducted to evaluate students' progression based on the ability scores. Results of the study showed that the programming course is effective as students made significant improvement upon course completion. In addition, group differences in gender and perceived competence (low vs medium vs high) were further explored with independent sample t-test. Results showed no significant gender differences regarding students' progression. In other words, boys and girls had similar initial levels of programming ability scores and rates of improvement regarding programming concepts. Results further revealed some interesting group patterns that boys with medium levels of perceived competence and girls with low levels of perceived competence show the most rapid improvement, indicating the course influenced different groups of students to different extents. Findings of this study shed light on the importance of visual block-based programming as a means for fostering programming concepts among primary school students. Educational policymakers sh
There is scientific knowledge about how to teach software programming, and the necessity to foster young learners' interest in computer science is broadly addressed. However, there is a lack of research on how to ...
详细信息
ISBN:
(纸本)9781728110004
There is scientific knowledge about how to teach software programming, and the necessity to foster young learners' interest in computer science is broadly addressed. However, there is a lack of research on how to teach programming skills in a way that increases the learners' interest in the topic. We present a training session for young students, in order to support the acquisition of programming skills and, at the same time, a positive view towards computer science. The programming environment is based on a visualblock-based application within a living lab. Thus, the abstract concept of software programming is presented within a real context and tightly connected to real experiences. In this training, the learners were introduced to a living lab and to programming concepts in order to acquire basics of programming. Two user studies with 44 7th and 8th grade students were conducted, specifically, the students' interest in computer science and their acquisition of programming skills were assessed. Two instructional interventions to support knowledge acquisition, namely worked examples and instructional procedures, were compared. The results did not strongly support one of these instructional interventions, thus, both seem to be appropriate in order to help learners to acquire basic programming skills. In sum, the results show that the tight connection of the training session to a real-world scenario can foster programming skills. This paper contributes by showing the potential of using visual block-based programming in the context of living labs in order to enable students to begin with programming activities.
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