TY - GEN
T1 - Visual programming and automatic evaluation of exercises
T2 - 46th Annual Frontiers in Education Conference, FIE 2016
AU - De Oliveira Brandão, Leônidas
AU - Bosse, Yorah
AU - Gerosa, Marco Aurélio
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.
PY - 2016/11/28
Y1 - 2016/11/28
N2 - Programming capabilities are important to the new professionals. Although several initiatives all over the world haves been proposed for teaching programming to people at all levels. Many undergraduate students still fail in the programming courses. Proposed strategies have included visual programming and automatic evaluation of exercises. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of knowledge about students' perceived difficulties in using these strategies in practice: that is, their challenges to learning how to program. In this paper, we report a study aimed at understanding these difficulties and strategies in a STEM course. We used an environment comprising a visual programming tool to introduce algorithms, iVProg with iAssign, and the virtual programming lab (VPL) to introduce programming in C, both with automatic assessment integrated to Moodle. We report quantitative and qualitative results and future directions. Teachers and tool designers can leverage these results to better support programming learning.
AB - Programming capabilities are important to the new professionals. Although several initiatives all over the world haves been proposed for teaching programming to people at all levels. Many undergraduate students still fail in the programming courses. Proposed strategies have included visual programming and automatic evaluation of exercises. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of knowledge about students' perceived difficulties in using these strategies in practice: that is, their challenges to learning how to program. In this paper, we report a study aimed at understanding these difficulties and strategies in a STEM course. We used an environment comprising a visual programming tool to introduce algorithms, iVProg with iAssign, and the virtual programming lab (VPL) to introduce programming in C, both with automatic assessment integrated to Moodle. We report quantitative and qualitative results and future directions. Teachers and tool designers can leverage these results to better support programming learning.
KW - Automatic evaluation
KW - Difficulty
KW - Learning
KW - Novice
KW - Programming
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85006761843&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85006761843&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/FIE.2016.7757621
DO - 10.1109/FIE.2016.7757621
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85006761843
T3 - Proceedings - Frontiers in Education Conference, FIE
BT - FIE 2016 - Frontiers in Education 2016
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 12 October 2016 through 15 October 2016
ER -