Programming web-course analysis: How to introduce computer programming?

Nowadays, computer programming and logical thinking skills have been proposed as a fundamental knowledge, even to young learners. On one hand, in undergraduate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) courses, the first contact of students with the logic of programming usually results in hig...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2014 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) Proceedings pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors: da Silva Ribeiro, Romenig, de Oliveira Brandao, Leonidas, Machado Faria, Tulio Vitor, Franco Brandao, Anarosa Alves
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.10.2014
Subjects:
elearning
iAssign
introduction to programming
iVProg
mental workload
MOOC
Moodle
NASA TLX
Optical wavelength conversion
textual programming
visual programming
VPL
web-learning
ISSN:0190-5848
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Nowadays, computer programming and logical thinking skills have been proposed as a fundamental knowledge, even to young learners. On one hand, in undergraduate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) courses, the first contact of students with the logic of programming usually results in high failure rates. The literature and experiments conducted by the authors point out that this occurs regardless the adopted programming language. On the other hand, the literature presents some positive results when the paradigm used to introduce the subject is Visual Programming (VP), where the learners use icons to build their programs. This approach is successful even with young learners. In this context, a relevant question is whether, and how, the Visual Programming can help learners to understand a traditional textual programming language. The proposal of this work is to study differences between visual and traditional programming by analyzing the mental workload of using both paradigms during the introduction of algorithms and basic concepts of programming in the context of an online course of introductory programming. In order to perform such analysis, we adopted the NASA TLX protocol.
ISSN:0190-5848
DOI:10.1109/FIE.2014.7044140