ABSTRACT
This paper addresses problems of learning programming languages for healthcare professionals. Learners may have limitation of time to understand and apply their knowledge and skills of these topics. This study aimed to create a course design and a flexible learning platform to increase the flexibility learning platform for programming languages in both the normal and the COVID-19 situations. The way in which learners learn was discussed and designed. After a lecture-based session, students could use any of their computing devices including computers with several operating systems, tablets, and smartphones to practice the exercise. Students may workout whenever they wanted and from any locations when the internet connection was provided. In the course design, it began with the programming module and then follow by the computer system module. In this module, a flexible learning platform was constructed to teach the PHP. The real server was installed with Ubuntu Linux, and environments for running the PHP. For the client, only a web browser was enough to learn coding. However, some useful editors with the ability of remote syncing files on the server, were introduced. With this platform, instructors could easily review and modify codes written by learners. Learners also gained some experiences in the computer systems module, i.e., operating systems and network. This concept was applied on a course namely "Computer Systems and Principles of Programming for Pharmaceutical and Health Informatics” in Master Degree in Pharmacy (Health Informatics) in academic year of 2021 during the COVID-19 situation. The results from the questionnaire suggested that the course design and the platform were very useful and flexible. Students had more knowledge and skills by using this learning environment. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.
ABSTRACT
Full research paper - In this paper, we report on the development of a succinct and easy-to-administer 11-item scale that quantifies students' self-efficacy, social aspect, independence, and meaning of studies, with a focus on introductory programming studies. The scale has been constructed using exploratory factor analysis of survey response data collected from students attending introductory programming courses offered by two universities. We evaluate the scale by using it to examine differences between university contexts, and assess to what extent the scale relates to students' perceived impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on studies, prior programming experience, self-assessed competence, and seeking help. Our evaluation of the scale suggests that social aspect was correlated with being more strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, while the perceived ability to work independently was correlated with reduced influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior programming experience was positively correlated with self-perceived ability to work independently and with self-efficacy. Similarly, self-estimated competence was positively correlated with self-efficacy. Finally, social aspect and meaning of studies were positively correlated with help-seeking. Our evaluations show that the scale holds promise as a new tool for researchers and practitioners seeking to improve understanding of their study contexts. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Computer programming is a complex field that requires rigorous practice in programming code writing and learning skills, which can be one of the critical challenges in learning and teaching programming. The complicated nature of computer programming requires an instructor to manage its learning resources and diligently generate programming-related questions for students that need conceptual programming and procedural programming rules. In this regard, automatic question generation techniques help teachers carefully align their learning objectives with the question designs in terms of relevancy and complexity. This also helps in reducing the costs linked with the manual generation of questions and fulfills the need of supplying new questions through automatic question techniques. This paper presents a theoretical review of automatic question generation (AQG) techniques, particularly related to computer programming languages from the year 2017 till 2022. A total of 18 papers are included in this study. one of the goals is to analyze and compare the state of the field in question generation before COVID-19 and after the COVID-19 period, and to summarize the challenges and future directions in the field. In congruence to previous studies, there is little focus given in the existing literature on generating questions related to learning programming languages through different techniques. Our findings show that there is a need to further enhance experimental studies in implementing automatic question generation especially in the field of programming. Also, there is a need to implement an authoring tool that can demonstrate designing more practical evaluation metrics for students. © 2022, International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications. All Rights Reserved.
ABSTRACT
Learning how to program in Primary Education has attracted significant research in recent years. It is unclear though how programming environments and languages should be adapted to children to achieve better learning and use, but one trend seems to be the use of Scratch. The question in this paper is what programming environment can be used to continue teaching programming to children who have already been taught Scratch for years. This paper's proposal is that students aged between 10 and 12 can benefit from interacting with a friendly learning companion using p-code such as Alcody. The hypothesis is that students (aged between 10 and 12) with a knowledge of Scratch will be able to significantly improve their scores by using a learning companion to teach them how to program even during the COVID-19 pandemic. To check the hypothesis, an experiment was carried out during the 2019/2020 academic year with 137 students in Ecuador. A significant improvement in the scores of the students was recorded together with high satisfaction.