PROGRAMMING LEARNING: DIFFICULTIES AND SUPPORT TOOLS António José Mendes – University of Coimbra

Portugal 2 Vilnius - August 2010

Coimbra 3 Vilnius - August 2010

University of Coimbra 4 Vilnius - August 2010

Our research center  CISUC – Centro de Informática e Sistemas da Universidade de Coimbra  Cognitive and Media Systems  Adaptive Computing  Software and Systems Engineering  Communications and Telematics  Information Systems  Evolutionary and Complex Systems 5 Vilnius - August 2010

Our group  Cognitive and Media Systems  Knowledge & Intelligent Systems Lab  Computational Creativity and Digital Media Lab  Ambience Inteligence Lab  Educational Technology Lab 6 Vilnius - August 2010

Our Lab  The main themes  Computer Science Education  Simulation-based Educational Systems  Collaborative and Social Learning Environments  The (current) team  3 PhD  7 PhD students (one waiting to defend)  1 MSc student  1 BSc student 7 Vilnius - August 2010

Summary  The problem  The difficulties  What we can find in the literature  What we did in the past  What we did more recently  What we are doing now 8 Vilnius - August 2010

Summary  The problem  The difficulties  What we can find in the literature  What we did in the past  What we did more recently  What we are doing now 9 Vilnius - August 2010

The problem - 1  Learning programming is difficult, no matter the language and/or paradigm used  Incapacity to create an algorithm to solve a given problem  Difficulties to detect logical errors in their own code  Misconceptions about basic concepts  Low success rates even for Computer Science students  Complaints from other courses teachers 10 Vilnius - August 2010

The problem - 2  Learning programming requires both knowledge and skill  Teaching methodologies often fail to help students develop abilities in programming practice  Maybe, to a certain degree, programming should be considered a skill-based or artistic discipline  There is a parallel with musical instrument learning  Practice based, but few reach a high proficiency level  Some learners develop quickly and show “ability” while others seem unable to move beyond the basics 11 Vilnius - August 2010

Summary  The problem  The difficulties  What we can find in the literature  What we did in the past  What we did more recently  What we are doing now 12 Vilnius - August 2010

Summary  The problem  The difficulties  What we can find in the literature  What we did in the past  What we did more recently  What we are doing now 13 Vilnius - August 2010

The difficulties - 1  Student’s backgrounds and attitudes  Several programming levels and learning styles in the same class  Used to memorization and to solve problems using formulas  Low curiosity and incapacity to take programming difficulties as personal challenges  “Minimum effort law”  Errors are often seen as a problem and not as learning opportunities  Inadequate study strategies 14 Vilnius - August 2010

The difficulties - 2  The subject  High abstraction level  Essentially a problem solving subject  Language syntaxes are complex (were created to professionals)  IDEs don’t ease error detection (especially logical errors) 15 Vilnius - August 2010

The difficulties - 3  The teaching  Traditional classes have low impact in student’s abilities to solve problems  Individualization is very difficult due to class sizes  It is difficult to help students to overcome their difficulties  Static learning materials are still central in many courses 16 Vilnius - August 2010

Summary  The problem  The difficulties  What we can find in the literature  What we did in the past  What we did more recently  What we are doing now 17 Vilnius - August 2010

Summary  The problem  The difficulties  What we can find in the literature  What we did in the past  What we did more recently  What we are doing now 18 Vilnius - August 2010

19  Mini-languages  Mini-Java,...  Controlled development environments  BlueJ, jGRASP,...  Solution test tools  Mooshak,...  Microworlds  Karel, the robot,... What we can find in literature - 1 Vilnius - August 2010

 Animation tools   Simulation tools  Algorithms (SICAS, …)  Programs (Jeliot, OOP-Anim,...)  Collaborative tools  College, Vilnius - August 2010 What we can find in literature - 2

Summary  The problem  The difficulties  What we can find in the literature  What we did in the past  What we did more recently  What we are doing now 21 Vilnius - August 2010

Summary  The problem  The difficulties  What we can find in the literature  What we did in the past  What we did more recently  What we are doing now 22 Vilnius - August 2010

23 What we did in the past - 1

Vilnius - August  SICAS is a system to support learning of basic programming concepts, such as selection and repetition  It has features designed to help students visualize how their own programs work, allowing them to find and correct errors that may exist What we did in the past - 2

Vilnius - August Simulation Variables Console What we did in the past - 3

Vilnius - August  OOP-Anim is a system to support learning of basic object oriented programming concepts  It shares the same pedagogical foundations of SICAS  It has features designed to help students visualize how their own object oriented programs work, allowing them to find and correct errors that may exist What we did in the past - 4

Vilnius - August What we did in the past - 5

Vilnius - August  Our experience shows that animation based simulation tools are useful to many students  But some students fail to take full advantage as they are unable to create a first solution (even wrong) to a proposed problem But

Summary  The problem  The difficulties  What we can find in the literature  What we did in the past  What we did more recently  What we are doing now 29 Vilnius - August 2010

Summary  The problem  The difficulties  What we can find in the literature  What we did in the past  What we did more recently  What we are doing now 30 Vilnius - August 2010

31 What we did more recently - 1

Vilnius - August  PESEN is a simple tool that introduces programming concepts in a very basic environment  Students have to program movements of simple shapes through basic commands, including repetiton and selection What we did more recently - 2

Vilnius - August What we did more recently - 3

Vilnius - August  ProGuide works together with SICAS, interacting with students during algorithm development, guiding them when necessary  It is a dialogue-based tool that helps novice programmers to solve problems using text based communication  When students are creating an algorithm, ProGuide monitors their actions (or lack of action) and interacts with them, trying to provide some guidance whenever necessary What we did more recently - 4

Vilnius - August What we did more recently - 5

Vilnius - August  SICAS-COL is a result of our collaboration with Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM)  It is a collaborative tool that results from the integration of SICAS with dialogue tools included in DOMOSIM-TPC  Supports distributed group work in the design of solutions to basic programming problems What we did more recently - 6

Vilnius - August What we did more recently - 7

Vilnius - August  COLLEGE is a Real-Time Collaborative Programming tool developed by UCLM with some collaboration from our side  It allows geographically distributed programmers to work concurrently and collaboratively on the same programming task (edition, compilation and execution)  Students that work in groups need to communicate, argue and give opinions to other group members, encouraging reflection and learning What we did more recently - 8

Vilnius - August What we did more recently - 9

Summary  The problem  The difficulties  What we can find in the literature  What we did in the past  What we did more recently  What we are doing now 40 Vilnius - August 2010

Summary  The problem  The difficulties  What we can find in the literature  What we did in the past  What we did more recently  What we are doing now 41 Vilnius - August 2010

42 What we are doing now