Towards Incremental Separation of Surmountable and Insurmountable Programming Difficulties

Abstract

In an offering of CS 1, we monitored the amount of help students in a class received through various means. We found that most students wanted help that went beyond office hours and email, and that for the vast majority of them, their grades correlated positively with the amount of help they received. However, increasing help also requires increasing instructional resources unless techniques can be found to separate the surmountable difficulties from the insurmountable ones. We have developed such a technique that looks at individual interaction logs and classifies difficulties incrementally as they occur. The insight behind the technique is that when students face surmountable difficulties, they tend to repeat certain action sequences, which can be detected to distinguish the surmountable difficulties from the insurmountable ones. A lab study shows that the mechanism gives significantly better results than the baselines.

Collaborative Strategy for Teaching and Learning Object-Oriented Programming course: A Case Study at Mostafa Stambouli Mascara University, Algeria

“…Besides, programming courses traditionally emphasize theoretical basis understanding of OO programming concepts, as well as its application in code fragment [33]. The concepts are truly learned during the practical experience to develop very high programming skills level, students needed to do often practice on programming exercises and to master debugging [1]. This course is presently brought to students in different strategies: traditional face-to-face learning [34], online learning [25], or in both situations called: blended learning [35].…”

“…The challenges of the act of teaching are diverse and intricate in Algeria, as in most universities of the world [1], but remain focused on its pedagogical components [2], [3]. Indeed, to make our university credible innovative learning environment, newly recruited teachers are trained in teaching methodology for several months.…”

The Effects of the TPACK-P Educational Program on Teachers’ TPACK: Programming as a Technological Tool

“…It is true that programming is less influenced by the educational context. Since existing text-based programming languages are associated with many difficulties in learning [38][39][40], this study used a blockbased programming language-Scratch-as a technological tool (Ref). However, there were still difficulties in designing a programming-based class [11,16,41].…”

Development and Application of the TPACK-P Education Program for Pre-Service Teachers’ TPACK

“…Unlike the expectation of researcher, the pre-service teachers had difficulty learning the programming that was first encountered. Thus, difficulty in the programming learning process is considered an impediment to the development of Technological Knowledge (TK)among pre-service teachers [24][25][26][27][28]. To develop comprehensive TPACK based on the development of pre-service teachers' TK, it is necessary to supplement pre-service teachers' effective learning of programming in the TPACK-P educational program [20][21][22].…”