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The course Introduction to Programming is one of the first and fundamental courses within any computer science-related study program. Traditionally, such introductory courses are characterized by a large group of students, whereas this group has a heterogeneous prior knowledge of the topic. These courses are usually taught in a traditional setting due to a high number of participants. However, the Covid-19 pandemic situation required to shift from traditional teaching to alternative approaches. In the winter semester 2020, a total of 636 students actively participated in the course at Graz University of Technology. Therefore, the course was revised to a fully online flipped classroom course using asynchronous elements such as pre-recorded videos and synchronous elements such as live streams on Twitch. In this paper, we show how we implemented a fully online course using the flipped classroom approach. We present approaches that engage students in active participation and encourage self-paced learning. We found that a high community-related interaction with students has a major impact on students satisfaction. This can be reached using lively communication and different communication channels. These results may be useful for researchers and lecturers that want to have insights into experiences in flipped classroom settings. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Aim/Purpose The goal of this study was twofold: first, to examine how learners’ behavioral engagement types affect their final grades in an online programming course;and second, to explore which factors most strongly affect student performance in an online programming course and their connection to the types of cognitive en-gagement. Background During the COVID-19 pandemic situation, information technology educational methods and teaching have been transforming rapidly into online or blended. In this situation, students learn course content through digital learning manage-ment systems (LMSs), and the behavioral data derived from students’ interac-tions with these digital systems is important for instructors and researchers. However, LMSs have some limitations. For computer science students, the tradi-tional learning management system is not enough because the coding behavior cannot be analyzed. Through the OpenEdu platform, we collected log data from 217 undergraduates enrolled in a Python programming course offered by Feng Chia University in Taiwan in the spring semester of 2021. Methodology We applied the evaluation framework of learning behavioral engagement con-ducted on a massive open online course (MOOC) platform and integrated it with the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach. PLS-SEM is widely used in academic research and is appropriate for causal models and small sample sizes. Therefore, this kind of analysis is consistent with the purpose of our study. Contribution In today’s fast-paced world of information technology, online learning is be-coming an important form of learning around the world. Especially in com-puter science, programming courses teach many skills, such as problem-solving, teamwork, and creative thinking. Our study contributes to the understanding of how behavioral engagements in distance programming learning affect student achievement directly and through cognitive engagement. The results can serve as a reference for practitioners of distance programming education. Findings Our results demonstrate that: (1) online time and video-watching constructs had significant effects on the self-assessment construct, self-assessment and video-watching constructs had significant effects on the final grade construct, and online document reading was not a significant factor in both self-assessments and final grades;(2) video watching had a most significant effect than other be-havioral constructs in an online programming course;(3) cognitive engagement types are inextricably linked to the development of a behavioral engagement framework for online programming learning. The mediation analysis and the im-portance-performance map analysis supported the importance of cognitive en-gagement. Recommendations for Practitioners (1) Online education platform developers and university policymakers should pay close attention to the development of self-assessment systems and design such systems based on students’ cognitive skills. (2) Instructors are advised to put substantial effort into the creation of videos for each course session and to actively promote students’ interest in the course material. Recommendations for Researchers The empirical results reported in this study allow a better understanding of the connection between behavioral engagement and final achievement. However, there are still great challenges in trying to explore more kinds of engagement, like emotional or social engagement. It would be interesting to deepen the re-sults obtained by integrating programming behavior like debugging and testing. Impact on Society Online programming courses allow students to improve their coding skills and computer science background. Students’ behavioral engagement strongly affects their academic achievement, their ability to complete a course successfully, and the quality of the learning process. Our work can encourage more people who are different majors in society to learn coding in an online environment even not only computer science students. Moreover, the fin ings of this study can be rec-ommendations for understanding students’ learning behavior and the develop-ment of distance programming learning. Future Research We suggest for future studies: (1) include a wider range of participants, such as students enrolled in MOOCs environments;(2) include more log data items that can express various students’ behavior, depending on the reliability and validity of the research model;and (3) conduct more detailed studies of the effects of emotional engagement as well as additional aspects of students’ social engage-ment to elucidate the factors affecting students’ behavioral participation and performance more thoroughly © 2022, Journal of Information Technology Education: Research.All Rights Reserved.
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Worldwide, computer science departments have experienced a dramatic increase in the number of student enrolments. Moreover, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic requires institutions to radically replace the traditional way of on-site teaching, moving interaction from physical to virtual space. We report on our strategies and experience tackling these issues as part of a Haskell-based functional programming and verification course, accommodating over 2000 students in the course of two semesters. Among other things, we fostered engagement with weekly programming competitions and creative homework projects, workshops with industry partners, and collaborative pair-programming tutorials. To offer such an extensive programme to hundreds of students, we automated feedback for programming as well as inductive proof exercises. We explain and share our tools and exercises so that they can be reused by other educators. © K. Kappelmann, J. Rädle & L. Stevens.
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This article reports on a three and a half year design-led project investigating the use of open-ended learning to teach programming to students of interaction design. Our hypothesis is that a more open-ended approach to teaching programming, characterized by both creativity and self-reflection, would improve learning outcomes among our cohort of aspiring HCI practitioners. The objective of our design-led action research was to determine how to effectively embed open-endedness, student-led teaching, and self-reflection into an online programming class. Each of these notions has been studied separately before, but there is a dearth of published work into their actual design and implementation in practice. In service of that objective we present our contribution in two parts: a qualitatively-derived understanding of student attitudes toward open-ended blended learning, as well as a matching set of design principles for future open-ended HCI education. The project was motivated by a search for better educational outcomes, both in terms of student coding self-efficacy and quantitative metrics of cohort performance (e.g., failure rates). The first year programming course within our interaction design-focussed Bachelors program has had the highest failure rate of any core unit for over a decade. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic confounded any year-to-year quantitative comparison of the learning efficacy of our successive prototypes. There is simply no way to fairly compare the experiences of pre-pandemic and pandemic-affected student cohorts. However, the experience of teaching this material in face-to-face, fully online, and hybrid modalities throughout the pandemic has aided our qualitative exploration of why open-ended learning helps some students but seems to harm others. Through three sets of student interviews, platform data, and insights gained from both the instructional and platform design process, we show that open-ended learning can empower students, but can also exacerbate fears and anxieties around inadequacy and failure. Through seven semesters of iterating on our designs, interviewing students and reflecting on our interventions, we've developed a set of classroom-validated design principles for teaching programming to HCI students without strong computational backgrounds.
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TAs are indispensable for first-year programming education offered at universities. The problem of students who cannot ask questions due to their inability to be proactive has become a major problem in online lectures due to the impact of COVID-19. In addition, the control of waiting for questions and responding to questions, as well as the mental stress of whether the TA will be able to respond to questions, can also be major problems. In this study, we propose and implement a method in which students do not ask questions directly to the TAs, but ask questions to the system, and the TAs check the questions in advance and call the TAs when they are available. Our method can lower the barrier for students to ask questions, and also reduce the mental load of TAs. We have used our method for a total of 1600 minutes in an actual online lecture and obtained high evaluations from students and TAs. © 2022 Japan Society for Software Science and Technology. All rights reserved.
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Teaching programming skills is an essential part of the first-semester computer science curriculum. During the Covid-19, it became particularly challenging as, in particular, the essential exercise lessons had to be implemented virtually. Before the pandemic, we implemented didactic concepts like objects-first and gamification with the hamster simulator. They had to be transferred to the virtual setting as good as possible. In this paper, we report on the implementation of our virtual course programming and software development. In particular, we report on the lessons we learnt from our course implementation, which, overall, was relatively successful. © 2022 Gesellschaft fur Informatik (GI). All rights reserved.
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Due to COVID-19, many educational institutions are using non-face-to-face online education services for programming lectures. However, it is not easy for one person to manage various features, which are scoring the assignment and practice, problem feedback, and so on, in the online programming education service. This paper develops an educational system for programming education using an open source-based online judge system for easy management of instructors. In addition, it defines and implements an academic interface. © 2022 IEEE.
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Introductory programming courses can be challenging due to heterogeneous student backgrounds. While novice programmers find even basic contents very demanding, experienced programmers are not sufficiently challenged. Having both novice and experienced programmers attend the same lab exercise can have a negative impact on novice programmers' self-efficacy. To create a better teaching environment for students, two different tracks were introduced in our introductory programming course, one for beginners and one for advanced students. Incoming students are offered a voluntary exam that can be used to obtain a place in the advanced track. Only one course is held throughout the semester but the advanced track does not begin lab exercises until the middle of the semester. This paper outlines the design and implementation of our course and its placement exam. It describes how, over the past four years, internal factors such as student feedback and grades, as well as external factors such as COVID-19, have influenced the design of the placement exam. Various statistics collected during this period are analysed and compared with results from the CEd literature. © 2022 ACM.
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With the increasing hybrid blend of face-to-face and remote study in the higher education, finding strategies to keep students motivated when working from home is pertinent. This paper describes gamification in online learning environments, from the viewpoint of individuals undertaking programming education. In this empirical study, both qualitative and quantitative research methods are employed to investigate the hypothesis that gamified motivational methods would increase students’ motivation when learning programming remotely at a higher education level. This hypothesis was formed following an observed motivational drop regarding studies during the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with an observed consistency of engagement in the video games industry. An initial questionnaire with 90 respondents from multiple backgrounds explores game design elements as a concept and investigates the current or historical motivation of individuals working from home. Conclusions were drawn that participants’ motivation working from home were mixed, and that formative feedback and game design elements were perceived to be motivating to a learner, and these results were used to inform the design of two learner-centred virtual learning environments. These virtual learning environments were designed to facilitate programming tasks online in two settings: one being a traditional academic setting with staged communication with a virtual tutor, and the second being a gamified setting, completing missions and gaining rewards in line with a storyline. These programming environments were then used in a practical, yet remote, experiment with 25 participants who were current university students, graduates or recent education-leavers. These experiments gained statistically significant results, showing that the gamified system and specific gamified elements were found to be considerably motivating to the learner. This work therefore makes the following contribution: that gamified elements such as badges, rewards and missions do increase students’ motivation when engaging with virtual learning environments for programming. This work is relevant for programming and computing educators, digital education researchers and gamification researchers. © the authors, 2021. All Rights Reserved.