An official website of the United States government
Many students struggle with decomposition and planning despite the necessity of these skills in computing education. Hence, more tools are needed to scaffold these processes. In this paper, we present Jigsaw, a standalone visual planning tool to help students practice decomposition and planning before writing code. Jigsaw allows students to compose a solution to a new problem based on previously seen “patterns,” such as the accumulator pattern for summing values or the filter pattern for conditional input selection. Students can connect these patterns together to see how data flows between them and define a solution plan. Jigsaw’s goal is to scaffold students’ planning processes by presenting relevant patterns for a given problem. Using a within-subjects design, we evaluated Jigsaw by observing 17 undergraduate students as they planned for and implemented two programming assignments. The experimental task included Jigsaw, and the control task did not. This design aimed to understand how the tool impacted students’ planning and programming process. Subsequently, we conducted interviews with these students regarding their planning and programming experiences with and without Jigsaw. Many students explicitly mentioned they would employ Jigsaw for planning and appreciated the scaffolding it provided. Students also admired the Jigsaw’s novelty in visualizing programming problems. We conclude with our design takeaways and recommendations for future work.
more »
« less
The Impact of a Single Lecture on Program Plans in First-Year CS
Most programming problems have multiple viable solutions that organize the underlying problem’s tasks in fundamentally different ways. Which organizations (a.k.a. plans) students implement and prefer depends on solutions they have seen before as well as features of their programming language. How much exposure to planning do students need before they can appreciate and produce different plans? We report on a study in which students in introductory courses at two universities were given a single lecture on planning between assessments. In the post-assessment, many students produced multiple high-level plans (including ones first introduced in the lecture) and richly discussed tradeoffs between plans. This suggests that planning can be taught with fairly low overhead once students have a decent foundation in programming.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1647486
- PAR ID:
- 10067511
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Koli Calling
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)Project-based learning can encourage and motivate students to learn through exploring their own interests, but introduces special challenges for novice programmers. Recent research has shown that novice students perceive themselves to be "bad at programming, especially when they do not know how to start writing a program, or need to create a plan before getting started. In this paper, we present PlanIT, a guided planning tool integrated with the Snap! programming environment designed to help novices plan and program their open-ended projects. Within PlanIT, students can add a description for their project, use a to do list to help break down the steps of implementation, plan important elements of their program including actors, variables, and events, and view related example projects. We report findings from a pilot study of high school students using PlanIT, showing that students who used the tool learned to make more specific and actionable plans. Results from student interviews show they appreciate the guidance that PlanIT provides, as well as the affordances it offers to more quickly create program elements.more » « less
-
Objectives The traditional, instructor-led form of live coding has been extensively studied, with findings showing that this form of live coding imparts similar learning to static-code examples. However, a concern with Traditional Live Coding is that it can turn into a passive learning activity for students as they simply observe the instructor program. Therefore, this study compares Active Live Coding—a form of live coding that leverages in-class coding activities and peer discussion—to Traditional Live Coding on three outcomes: 1) students’ adherence to effective programming processes, 2) students’ performance on exams and in-lecture questions, and 3) students’ lecture experience. Participants Roughly 530 students were enrolled in an advanced, CS1 course taught in Java at a large, public university in North America. The students were primarily first- and second-year undergraduate students with some prior programming experience. The student population was spread across two lecture sections—348 students in the Active Live Coding (ALC) lecture and 185 students in the Traditional Live Coding (TLC) lecture. Study Methods We used a mixed-methods approach to answer our‘ research questions. To compare students’ programming processes, we applied process-oriented metrics related to incremental development and error frequencies. To measure students’ learning outcomes, we compared students’ performance on major course components and used pre- and post-lecture questionnaires to compare students’ learning gain during lectures. Finally, to understand students’ lecture experience, we used a classroom observation protocol to measure and compare students’ behavioral engagement during the two lectures. We also inductively coded open-ended survey questions to understand students’ perceptions of live coding. Findings We did not find a statistically significant effect of ALC on students’ programming processes or learning outcomes. It seems that both ALC and TLC impart similar programming processes and result in similar student learning. However, our findings related to students’ lecture experience shows a persistent engagement effect of ALC, where students’ behavioral engagement peaks andremains elevatedafter the in-class coding activity and peer discussion. Finally, we discuss the unique affordances and drawbacks of the lecture technique as well as students’ perceptions of ALC. Conclusions Despite being motivated by well-established learning theories, Active Live Coding did not result in improved student learning or programming processes. This study is preceded by several prior works that showed that Traditional Live Coding imparts similar student learning and programming skills as static-code examples. Though potential reasons for the lack of observed learning benefits are discussed in this work, multiple future analyses to further investigate Active Live Coding may help the community understand the impacts (or lack thereof) of the instructional technique.more » « less
-
Most social challenges fall outside of the authority of any single individual and therefore require collective action—coordinated efforts by many stakeholders to implement solutions. Despite growing interest in teaching students to lead collective action, we lack models for how to teach these skills. Collective action ostensibly involves design: the act of planning to change existing situations into preferred ones. In other domains, instructors commonly scaffold design using an instructional model known as studio critique in which students strengthen their plans by exchanging arguments with peers and instructors. This study explores whether studio critique can serve as the basis for an effective instructional model in collective action. Using design-based research methods, we designed and implemented scoping deliberations, a new instructional model that augments studio critique with domain-specific templates for planning collective action and repeats weekly to enable iterations. We used process tracing to analyze data from field notes, video, and artifacts to evaluate causal explanations for events observed in this case study. By implementing scoping deliberations in a 10-week undergraduate course, we found that this model appeared effective at scaffolding engagement in planning collective action: students articulated and refined their plans by engaging in argumentation and iteration, as expected. However, students struggled to contact the community stakeholders with whom they planned to work. As a result, their plans rested on implausible, untested assertions. These findings advance instructional science by showing that collective action may require new instructional models that help students to test their assertions against feedback from community stakeholders. Practically, scoping deliberations appear most useful for scaffolding thoughtful planning in conditions when students are already collaborating with stakeholders.more » « less
-
In computing classrooms, building an open-ended programming project engages students in the process of designing and implementing an idea of their own choice. An explicit planning process has been shown to help students build more complex and ambitious open-ended projects. However, novices encounter difficulties in exploring and creatively expressing ideas during planning. We present Idea Builder, a storyboarding-based planning system to help novices visually express their ideas. Idea Builder includes three features: 1) storyboards to help students express a variety of ideas that map easily to programming code, 2) animated example mechanics with example actors to help students explore the space of possible ideas supported by the programming environments, and 3) synthesized starter code to help students easily transition from planning to programming. Through two studies with high school coding workshops, we found that students self-reported as feeling creative and feeling easy to communicate ideas; having access to animated example mechanics of an actor help students to build those actors in their plans and projects; and that most students perceived the synthesized starter code from Idea Builder as helpful and time-saving.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
