A Model for Teaching and Learning Programming Subjects in Public Secondary Schools of Malaysia

Abstract

In recent years, more and more countries have included programming as one of the subjects in the national education curriculum. However, comparatively less attention has been paid to reviewing the methodologies and tools, according to our observations. This paper aims to review methods and tools that have been applied in higher education levels and identify the most effective one to be applied in teaching and learning programming in high schools. The possible methods to be applied in high schools are highly dependent on the education landscape of the country itself. Therefore, the methods proposed in this paper are identified by considering education issues in Malaysia such as language of communication, digital divide and schools’ teaching and learning time. We conducted an interview with the teachers and students to identify the real problems of teaching and learning programming in Malaysia public secondary schools. From the interview and extensive review of literature, possible model elements have been identified. We found that teaching and learning programming at high school level should incorporate the following main features; incorporating computational thinking, IDE-centric learning, relation to life-example, reiterative method and spaced exercise, effective questioning, support multi-language and self-study. However, all of these recommendations should be studied for their effectiveness by conducting a detail testing. Thus, we conducted an expert evaluation by using a learning management system (LMS) that we created specifically to represent our suggested model components. The findings gathered from the expert evaluation confirms on the needs to give high priority to the following model components; reiterative and chunking, effective questioning, designing instructional materials, followed by adaptive learning, language and self-study. The components identified during the research process that are worthwhile to continue to prove their level of efficiency are AI, support think-pair, competition-based, gamification, mobile friendly and low usage of system resources (small memory footprint or RAM usage and low CPU usage). It is hoped that our model can be adopted by public secondary schools in Malaysia to produce the best tools or methods for teaching programming. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings and suggest future research directions that could develop a more holistic understanding of this pedagogical technique.