With the swift development of technology in recent years, entrepreneurs are facing rapid changes in industry. To cope with such changes at home and abroad, The Ministry of Education is actively promoting innovative education with the aim of cultivating students' entrepreneurship. On this basis, this study proposes an innovative curriculum design based on an Internet-of-Things (IoT) programming course. The reason is that it develops computational thinking skills while students are learning programming and also cultivates logical thinking skills and problem-solving skills, which are critical to entrepreneurship. We also design a number of learning activities that enable students to express their opinions and ideas while gaining more knowledge through peer interaction and discussion. Overall, this study explores the impact of "maker education" on students' attitudes toward computer thinking. The results indicate that maker education has a positive impact on their ability to learn computer skills. In terms of learning motivation, students are not motivated by maker education and reduce their confidence on the curriculum. The reason may be that the curriculum requires the acquisition of software and hardware skills, which will increase the student's learning burden, so they more likely to encounter learning disabilities.

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PurposeIn a programming course, students often need tutors' assistance to complete learning activities, as they lack enough background knowledge to complete tasks. A further problem is that without individual tutoring, the knowledge gap between students increases. Therefore, the authors have proposed an instant response learning supplement tool (IRLST) to support students' learning, in order to facilitate students' independent problem-solving skills.Design/methodology/approachThe authors divided the students into two groups according to their learning styles: verbal and visual. The IRLST was used to collect and analyze the information on their usage and provide supplementary resources to facilitate their learning. The proposed system also analyzed the student usage, background knowledge and exam scores to assess their academic performance.FindingsAccording to the results of statistical analysis, students' learning performance improved significantly, especially low-scoring students. Moreover, as compiler messages were not recognized, students tended to identify the same problems. Thus, it is suggested that teachers not only should focus on improving the students' syntax but also strengthening their background knowledge and debugging skills.Research limitations/implicationsThere are two main limitations in this study: (1) as most of the students were in the visual learning group, the size of the groups was impacted, thus it was not possible to establish a control group; (2) one specific version of the IRLST system did not send reliable advice or supplementary content occasionally.Originality/valueThe IRLST developed in this study can be used to provide immediate supplementary resources to help students overcoming programming problems and developing problem-solving skills.

In recent years, the government has actively set up computer programming courses to train those with the relevant talent; however, the learning performance of the students is not ideal. Therefore, in order to learn programming skills, students usually adopt note-taking strategies because, due to the pressure of the course, the teachers do not have sufficient time to help the students to fully understand the course content. This means that some students take notes without thinking, so their academic performance is usually poor. This study, therefore, proposes an innovative curriculum design that is based on the “Note-taking System and Teaching Strategy’’ (NSTS), which combines learning style concepts and peer learning concepts to achieve student interaction and promote their thinking skills. In the learning activity, students are asked to search for additional supplementary material and to write their own notes, and then the members of group can read their notes and learn from them. However, the results of the study show that the NSTS curriculum design exhibits significant differences for improving the students' academic performance, and that it also has a certain influence on their learning motivation.

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