Exploring students' computational practice, design and performance of problem-solving through a visual programming environment

This study aims to advocate that a visual programming environment offering graphical items and states of a computational problem could be helpful in supporting programming learning with computational problem-solving. A visual problem-solving environment for programming learning was developed, and 15...

Celý popis

Uloženo v:
Podrobná bibliografie
Vydáno v:Computers and education Ročník 95; s. 202 - 215
Hlavní autor: Chao, Po-Yao
Médium: Journal Article
Jazyk:angličtina
Vydáno: Elsevier Ltd 01.04.2016
Témata:
ISSN:0360-1315, 1873-782X
On-line přístup:Získat plný text
Tagy: Přidat tag
Žádné tagy, Buďte první, kdo vytvoří štítek k tomuto záznamu!
Popis
Shrnutí:This study aims to advocate that a visual programming environment offering graphical items and states of a computational problem could be helpful in supporting programming learning with computational problem-solving. A visual problem-solving environment for programming learning was developed, and 158 college students were conducted in a computational problem-solving activity. The students' activities of designing, composing, and testing solutions were recorded by log data for later analysis. To initially unveil the students' practice and strategies exhibited in the visual problem-solving environment, this study proposed several indicators to quantitatively represent students' computational practice (Sequence, Selection, Simple iteration, Nested iteration, and Testing), computational design (Problem decomposition, Abutment composition, and Nesting composition), and computational performance (Goal attainment and Program size). By the method of cluster analysis, some empirical patterns regarding the students' programming learning with computational problem-solving were identified. Furthermore, comparisons of computational design and computational performance among the different patterns of computational practice were conducted. Considering the relations of students' computational practice to computational design and performance, evidence-based suggestions on the design of supportive programming environments for novice programmers are discussed. •A visual problem-solving environment was proposed to support programming learning.•Students exhibited different patterns of computational practice in the environment.•Patterns of computational practice were correlated with computational design and performance.
Bibliografie:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0360-1315
1873-782X
DOI:10.1016/j.compedu.2016.01.010