Less is More! Preliminary Evaluation of Multi-Functional Document-Based Online Learning Environment

This work-in-progress paper in innovative practice category presents and evaluates a multi-functional document-based learning management system, TIM (The Interactive Material). This system is developed with the goal of integrating a rich set of features seamlessly into teachers’ every-day pedagogical and disciplinary needs. The aim is that a single system (“Less”) would provide all technological solutions necessary for online teaching and learning (“More”), hence the punchline “Less is More!” We illustrate the system and evaluate it based on feedback from teachers. This preliminary evaluation focuses on how teachers reacted to the multi-functional system and is discussed in the context of T…

Understanding differences among coding club students

Scholars and instructors have been carrying out a multitude of actions to increase students' interest in computer science during the past years. Still, there is a need for knowledge on how these attempts develop student interest. In this qualitative study, we construct illustrative categories out of students who have attended our K-12 coding club and game programming summer course activities. We found four categories: Inactivity, Lack of self-direction, Experimenting, and Professionalism. We also briefly project this abstraction onto a four-phase model of interest development.

Ohjelmointi 1 : C#

Computer Science Outreach Workshop and Interest Development: A Longitudinal Study

This longitudinal study investigates the impact of an extra-curricular programming workshop in student interest development in computer science. The workshop was targeted at 12–18-year old youngsters. A survey was sent to all previous participants with a known home address; 31.5% responded the survey (n = 197). This data was then combined with pre-workshop survey data, and analyzed with mixed methods. Positive development of interest was discovered for 57% of the respondents, of which nearly all attributed their interest increase to the workshop at least partly (92%). Qualitative inspection revealed that the workshop provided three anchors that facilitated students’ reengagement with progra…

Five Years of Game Programming Outreach : Understanding Student Differences

This paper presents lessons learned from five years of teaching a five-day game design and programming outreach course. The course was offered in summer time and targeted at middle and high school students. In total, 462 youngsters have taken part in 21 course instances. We describe our course concept, and discuss our successes and challenges. In particular, we focus on understanding our student populations by presenting descriptives and statistics of the events, and performing a statistical cluster analysis based on pre- and post-surveys. The cluster analysis was complemented with an analysis of the qualitative data, also originating from the surveys. Taken together, students could be clas…

Towards Computer-based Exams in CS1

Even though IDEs are often a central tool when learning to program in CS1, many teachers still lean on paper-based exams. In this study, we examine the “test mode effect” in CS1 exams using the Rainfall problem. The test mode was two-phased. Half of the participants started working on the problem with pen and paper, while the other half had access to an IDE. After submitting their solution, all students could rework their solution on an IDE. The experiment was repeated twice during subsequent course instances. The results were mixed. From the marking perspective, there was no statistically significant difference resulting from the mode. However, the students starting with the paper-based pa…

K-12 game programming course concept using textual programming

Several programming environments have been constructed to facilitate novice programming at K-12 and CS0/CS1 levels. The environments can be roughly divided into those using visual or textual programming. This paper presents a K-12 game programming course concept based on textual programming. The concept is based on an easy-to-use C# library, called Jypeli, built on top of Microsoft XNA Framework. The library tries to maintain advantages of visual programming and avoid challenges of textual programming. In particular, the library helps beginners to program their first games in a short period of time and without a heavy syntactic load. The course concept and an initial evaluation consisting o…

High school students' perspective to university CS1

This paper presents a qualitative study of a school-university collaborative project where a game-themed CS1 course was offered as-is to high school students. Our specific interest was to explore the students' experiences with the university level course. Our analyses indicate that immediate and regular support was highly important for student performance, as support of this kind could mitigate issues related to students' orientation towards the high workload of the course. Students who showed academic interest were likely to pass, whereas students lacking self-direction or work efficiency were likely to drop out. Both passed and drop-outs found the course to be a good learning experience. …

Exploring Creativity Expectation in CS1 Students’ View of Programming

Full paper in Research category: Literature provides creativity definitions that are applicable to educational settings. For example, the definition by Plucker et al. emphasizes the ‘social context’ in which the usefulness and novelty of a creative outcome is evaluated, and notes that this emphasis allows students’ coursework to be deemed creative without extraordinary characteristics. Computing educators tend to assume that incoming CS course populations welcome creativity, and utilize application contexts (e.g., games, media, arts, and robots) in which creativity is a central attribute. Previous research also suggests that beginner CS students may initially possess versatile identities re…

Life two years after a game programming course: longitudinal viewpoints on K-12 outreach

In our faculty we have run week-long K-12 game programming courses now for three summers. In this paper we investigate what programming-related activities students do after they take a course, and what factors in the students' background relate to post-course programming. We also investigate a possible change in the students' interest towards higher education science studies. We find that most students continue programming after the course and that their interest towards science studies keeps increasing. In student background we observed some indicative trends, but did not find reliable explaining factors related to post-course programming or increased interest towards science studies.

Identifying Pathways to Computer Science : The Long-Term Impact of Short-Term Game Programming Outreach Interventions

Short-term outreach interventions are conducted to raise young students’ awareness of the computer science (CS) field. Typically, these interventions are targeted at K–12 students, attempting to encourage them to study CS in higher education. This study is based on a series of extra-curricular outreach events that introduced students to the discipline of computing, nurturing creative computational thinking through problem solving and game programming. To assess the long-term impact of this campaign, the participants were contacted and interviewed two to five years after they had attended an outreach event. We studied how participating in the outreach program affected the students’ perceptio…

What Students Think About Game-Themed CS1

There has been rising academic interest in including computer game programming in CS1 curriculum during the past years, and many experience reports exist on the topic. Still, there is a need for knowledge on student reception, that is, how the students themselves view the game theme on a CS1 course. In this paper we review our CS1 course feedback from the years 2008–2013, of which three first years were carried out without games, while the latter three years part of our weekly assignments, plus a bigger course assignment, have been “game-themed”. We found that over 90 % found contextualization through games fun, motivating or rewarding in some other way. Less than 10%of the respondents have…

Incorporating teacher-student dialogue into digital course material : Usage patterns and first experiences

This work-in-progress research investigates teacher-student communication via Learning Management Systems (LMS) in highly populated courses. An LMS called TIM (The Interactive Material) includes a specific commenting technology that attempts to make teacher-student dialog effortless. The research goal is to explore students’ willingness to use the technology and identify patterns of usage. To these ends, a survey with both Likert and open-ended questions was issued to CS1 and CS2 students. A favorable student evaluation was observed while several critical viewpoints that inform technology development were revealed. We noticed that besides appreciating the possibility of making comments, man…

On the impact of computer science outreach events on K-12 students

Many countries have begun to adopt computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT) into national curricula of compulsory education and upper secondary education. It is argued that learning rigorous CS concepts not only secures a workforce for the future’s digital industries but also benefits all students by improving their problem-solving and logical reasoning skills. However, the popularity of CS as a university major declined in the beginning of the 21st century, resulting in the development of a range of student outreach activities to engage young students in the study of computing. This thesis originated from this need to attract and retain students in the CS field. The focus of thi…

Paper-based vs computer-based exams in CS1

In this study, we examine the "test mode effect" in CS1 exam using the Rainfall problem. The participants started working with pen and paper, after which they had access to a computer, and they could rework their solution with a help of a test suite developed by the authors. In the computer- based phase many students were able to fix the errors that they had committed during the paper-based phase. These errors included well-known corner cases, such as empty array or division by zero.

GAMEHIGHED Initial Report : Output 1: Initial Research & Analysis Report. Higher-ed Programmes for Careers in Game Design & Development (2019–2022)

Nuorten peliohjelmointi

Tässä pro gradu -tutkielmassa tutkitaan yläkouluikäisille (13 16-vuotiaat) tarkoitetun peliohjelmoinnin lyhytkurssin innostavuutta, ja vaikutuksia osallistujien suhtautumiseen luonnontieteiden opiskeluun. Osallistujien kurssikokemuksiin pyrittiin löytämään yhteyksiä taustatekijöistä. Lisäksi aineistosta etsittiin ryhmiä, jotka kuvaisivat tyypillisiä kurssille tulleita oppilaita. Tämän avulla on tarkoitus kehittää kurssin sisältöä, opetusmenetelmiä ja markkinointia. Tässä työssä esitellään myös pääpiirteet kurssin suunnittelusta ja toteutuksesta, ja lisäksi joitakin oppilaiden valmiista pelituotoksista ja pelisuunnitelmista.

Revisiting rainfall to explore exam questions and performance on CS1

The Rainfall problem comprises small tasks that have been used to investigate student performance in introductory programming. We conducted several kinds of analyses to inform our understandings of student performance in CS1 relating to this problem. We analyzed implementation approaches and program errors, as in related studies, and also explored the role of test writing vis-a-vis the most common student error. Finally, using correlation analyses and manual inspection of the exam answers, we studied how well the Rainfall problem served as an exam question. The students' implementation choices reflected their familiarity with particular loop constructs, while the single most common error co…