1. COMPSCI 747 Historical Overview

2. Early years Seymour Papert Mindstorms (1980) Lego Mindstorms
Developed Logo (1967)
Mindstorms (1980)
Lego Mindstorms

3. By Valiant Technology Ltd. , CC BY-SA 3. 0, https://commons. wikimedia

4. Visual Programming Languages
Text-based languages require precision of language
Spelling mistakes cause syntax errors
Hard for young children
Visual programming languages are easier to use
Allow children to engage in programming tasks
Interface can ensure every program is syntactically correct

5. Alice – mid to late 1990s
By Carnegie Mellon University - Captured from Alice 2.0 on Windows XP, Alice 2 End User License Agreement,

6. Developed 2002, released 2005, web-based 2013
By scratch.mit.edu, CC BY-SA 3.0,

7. Shifting focus of CS Education research
Novice programmers are one major focus
Online tools that support teaching practices – assessment
Learning analytics – analysing student data
More emphasis now on K-12 curriculum
Computational thinking
Gender Equity

8. The Rainfall Problem Elliot Soloway (1982)
Write a program that repeatedly reads in positive integers, until it reads the integer After seeing 99999, it should print out the average.
Most students struggled to produce a correct solution. Most subsequent studies have confirmed these findings.

9. Studying the Novice programmer
Edited by Elliot Soloway and James Spohrer (1989)
programming constructs
planning
misconceptions
errors
Research in 1980s suggested that students struggled most with planning programs.

10. Can students write code?
McCracken et al. (2001)
ITiCSE working group
Multi-institutional, multi-national study of program writing
Context was CS1 / CS2 courses
Average score was 23/110
“students did much more poorly than we expected”
Tasks were:
Program an RPN calculator
Programming an infix calculator without precedence
Programing an infix calculation with parentheses to indicate precedence

11. Can students understand code?
Lister et al. (2004) “Leeds Study”
Multi-institutional, multi-national
Code contains arrays, loops, conditions
Multiple choice answers
What is the output?
Many students couldn’t read code and choose the correct output
Assume reading is a pre-requisite for writing code – perhaps this explains the McCracken study?

12. Can students design software?
Design a “Super Alarm Clock”
Your system will need to:
• Allow a student to set an alarm to wake themselves up.
• Allow a student to set an alarm to remind themselves to go to sleep.
• Record when a student tells the system that they are about to go to sleep.
• Record when a student tells the system that they have woken up, and whether it is due to an alarm or not (within 2 minutes of an alarm going off).
• Make recommendations as to when a student needs to go to sleep. This should include "yellow alerts" when the student will need sleep soon, and "red alerts" when they need to sleep now.
• Store the collected data in a server or database for later analysis by researchers. The server/database system (which will also trigger the yellow/red alerts) will be designed and implemented by another team. You should, however, indicate in your design the behaviour you expect from the back-end system.
• Report students who are becoming dangerously sleep-deprived to someone who cares about them (their mother?). This is indicated by a student being given three “red alerts" in a row.
• Provide reports to a student showing their sleep patterns over time, allowing them to see how often they have ignored alarms, and to identify clusters of dangerous, or beneficial, sleep behaviour.
Eckerdal et al. (2006)
Multi-institutional, multi-national
Focused on graduating students
Most could not develop a design
21% nothing
41% added insignificant amount to existing description and no design
29% gave partial solution
9% produced reasonable designs

13. Code writing and code reading
BRACElet project (Whalley et al.)
Relationships between code writing, code tracing and code explaining
Possible hierarchy of skills
Code tracing
Code explaining (Explain in plain English)
Code writing

14. How do students learn? Teague and Lister (2014)
Neo-Piagetian theory
Swapping contents of variables
Rotating contents of variables
Rotating contents of an array
Reversing operations
Pre-operational – trace code, but focus on details
Concrete operational – reason about code, use diagrams.

15. Longitudinal study of a novice programmer
Teague and Lister (2014)
Series of “think aloud” sessions
Multiple sessions within first semester - follow-up three semesters later
Results
Exhibited mostly sensorimotor reasoning, then pre-operational reasoning.
Follow up showed concrete operational reasoning
Conclusion: Learning to program may take longer than we think.