Emerging from the pandemic: instructor reflections and students' perceptions on an introductory programming course in blended learning.

Teaching an introductory programming course to first-year students has long been a challenge for many college instructors. The COVID-19 pandemic, which caused unprecedented shifts in learning modality across the globe, has worsened the learning experience of novice programmers. Instructors have to find innovative ways to keep students engaged and learning. Blended or hybrid learning has become a new preferred way of learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Blended learning is viewed as a combination of both in-person and online instructions. Such a learning environment offers instructors the flexibility to provide learners with an engaging face-to-face learning experience while promoting the well-being and safety of students. Starting Fall 2020, York College (and other CUNY colleges) has since offered several courses in hybrid mode. Two years have passed since the abrupt transition. There were several lessons learned from the experiences. In this paper, I discussed evidence-based pedagogical approaches that were used to teach students in an introductory computer programming class at York College, CUNY, where blended learning was used. Student perceptions of learning experience and obtaining coding skills in both online and in-person environments are also presented. The findings from the survey suggested that students benefited from face-to-face interactions and feedback, while those who preferred an online environment liked the flexibility that online components offer. Through careful design and implementation of pedagogical approaches used in the class, novice programmers could potentially benefit from both face-to-face and online components of blended learning.

To Do or not to Do Previous Homework in Computer Education

The first contact of freshmen students with computer thinking and programming languages is not an easy task. There are several strategies that can be used before, during and after face-to-face classes. Flipped classes are a way to save time in activities that can be better done in the form of previous work - guided by the teacher. A n d the time gained in person can be used in tasks that are much more productive than traditional lectures. This study is based on an introductory programming semester of post lockdown COVID-19, initially with 101 students, with the strategy of providing study materials for students to work on before class (as in flipped classes). We use attendance in classes, acce ss-work MOODLE, the two grades obtained during the semester, as well as some information about the student (age, course, gender, previous knowledge of programming languages), and the level that the students think it was their presence in classes and on MOODLE in the middle and at the end of the semester to measure the success of the experiment. It seems that this type of strategy can be excellent for students who attend classes weekly and do their homework, but it can be a cause of dropout if taken to the extreme. © 2022 IEEE.

Evaluating Solo vs Pair Programming in an Online Setting for Introductory Programming Students

Many studies have shown the efficacy of pair programming for students learning to program. However, most of these studies have taken place in an in-person environment, where the driver and navigator are physically sharing a keyboard and screen and can communicate verbally and non-verbally. With the increase in online learning, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is important to know whether these results generalize to an online environment. In this work, we develop a methodology to replicate existing pair programming research in a remote context. Students can fulfill the same driver and navigator roles and share access to a single IDE. However, communication is limited to video chat, and participants can never physically interact. This will allow us to replicate various studies, evaluating the efficacy, perceptions, impacts, and perceptions of solo vs. pair programming. An initial study of 116 students enrolled in an introduction to programming course validated our experimental setup and showed that pair programming positively impacted the completion and correctness of programming exercises in an online environment. With 67.3% of pair programming submissions passing at least one test case, vs. 55.3% in the solo programming condition, and 63.5% of pair programming submissions passing all test cases vs. 45.0% of solo submissions (p < 0.02). This work validates our experimental design and shows promise that future work will be able to replicate many additional pair-programming studies in an online environment. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Implementation and Experiences of a Flipped Lecture Hall - A Fully Online Introductory Programming Course

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.

On Things that Matter in Learning Programming: Towards a Scale for New Programming Students

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.

A Remote Instructional Approach with Interactive and Collaborative Learning to Teach an Introductory Programming Course during COVID-19 Pandemic

This work presents our experience and approach of teaching an introductory CS programming course remotely in this pandemic era without missing out on the benefits of hands-on learning generally used in-person learning environment. Synchronous virtual learning occurs when students join an audio/video enabled meeting space at the same time through several cloud based services, such as Zoom based conference tool, interactive cloud based coding environment in repl.it and GoSoapBox platform for online in-classroom engagement, which were well integrated in the Canvas based Learning Management System (LMS). To keep the structure of the session much like an in person learning experience, the synchronous session included whole group instruction in Zoom led by the instructor and small group (breakout room) based lab work in Repl.it amongst the learners. Both interactive and collaborative learning are infused in pedagogy effectively so that students can learn using interactive platforms, tools, technologies, systems, and services as available to them and collaborate within and among groups. To evaluate the impact of this infusion, a pre- and post-survey were conducted on student cohort (4 sections taught by 3 different instructors) in the Fall'2020 semester. In addition, final project scores and final grades for Fall'2020 semester and enrollment number and final grade distributions from Fall'2017 to Fall'2020 were also available for analysis. The initial evaluation of the survey results and student's performances based on quality point scores show evidence to conclude that the proposed pedagogical approach increased student motivation and engagement and facilitated learning to entry-level computer science students. © 2021 IEEE.

A Four-year Study of a Placement Exam for an Introductory Programming Course

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.

Utilizing Computational Thinking in Programming to Reduce Academic Dishonesty and Promote Decolonisation

Higher education in South Africa has been in the spotlight in the past few years with calls for decolonisation of the curriculum and other matters. We teach a first-year programming module that is challenging to decolonise since the origin of programming languages is inherently Western. Students often do not resonate with some examples used, let alone concepts of programming in general. During COVID-19, emergency remote teaching and learning were adopted and we had to be mindful of various limitations, such as data usage and bandwidth. We experienced difficulty expanding each student's frame of reference. Furthermore, increased academic dishonesty occurrences were encountered. This paper focuses on contextualising the module content, promoting computational thinking, and reducing academic dishonesty. This was achieved in an action research cycle through enriching our assessment practices by creating a weekly assignment where the principles of computational thinking were applied within a problem-solving learning environment. It was found that most students had positive perceptions about the intervention and their views and experiences are reported. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.