Evaluación de las Emociones de los Estudiantes en el Aprendizaje Visual de la Programación

Abstract

Learning to program is an often complex and difficult task for students, especially for those who are beginning in this discipline for the first time. There are several causes of such difficulties when learning how to program, but probably one of the most relevant results from the difficulty involved in handling the syntactic expressions of the programming languages utilised in learning tasks. The student, in addition to confronting the understanding of programming concepts, has to manage the programming language in order to express the programs he/she code, which entails an additional cognitive load, and which in many cases leads students to lose motivation for learning. This article proposes a visual programming tool that allows the student to code programs by abstracting complex parts of the syntactic structure of the language, combining simple graphical representations with textual expressions of the language according to the students' level of understanding. This article describes an experiment in which a group of students used the aforementioned tool whilst another group utilised a development environment commonly used when learning programming. The results indicate that the number of students who reduced their error rate after the experiment was more than 23.4% in the group that used the tool compared to the group that used the typical development environment. Furthermore, it was found that the number of students who experienced positive emotions was greater in the group that used the tool in comparison to those that did not (60% vs 44.4%).