Abstract
It is considered hard to teach programming in secondary education while achieving the aims of curriculum. However, when teaching is supported by suitable methodologies, learning can be ameliorated. Under this premise, this paper discusses different teaching approaches to programming in secondary education and examines the potential benefit of sound-alerts as a complementary teaching tool. Such alerts were created by pairing different sound stimuli to specific programming actions and operations. Both the selection of the sound stimuli, as well as the potential impact of the use of sound alerts on programming are evaluated through subjective studies. Results showed that participants preferred synthesized to natural (pre-recorded) stimuli for all types of alerts. It was also revealed that users prefer sound-alerts associated to pending actions, errors, successful code execution, conditional statements and code looping over alerts highlighting the step-by-step execution of the code. Finally, the test results showed that students understand both the meaning and the use of code commands more clearly when they use a sound-enriched programming environment instead of a conventional one. These results were the motivation for the initial creation of an audio and voice messages’ data base and the initial design of a new comprehensive educational tool using sound.
Highlights
According to a popular definition, programming is the process of writing, testing, debugging/troubleshooting, and maintaining the source of code of computer programs [43], [47]
Glossomatheia is the basis for the evaluation of the effect of auditory cues on computer programming comprehension and the idea to test auditory feedback using sounds in the system presented was highly motivated by Peep, since our main goal was to achieve a better understanding in programming teaching by using sounds
EVALUATION STUDY OF SECOND EXPERIMENT Following the preliminary study, a second experiment was conducted to assess the effectiveness of sound-alerts as a complementary tool for teaching computer programming
Summary
According to a popular definition, programming is the process of writing, testing, debugging/troubleshooting, and maintaining the source of code of computer programs [43], [47]. High-school students should be taught programming concepts independently of specific applications and programming languages [49], [50]. They all have different needs and difficulties, which can be divided into 5 categories [15]: 1) orientation: discovering the usefulness and benefits of programming 2) notional machine (the general properties of the machine): Realizing how the behaviour of the physical machine relates to the notional machine 3) notation: includes problems related to syntax and semantics 4) structures: understanding the schemas or plans that can be used to reach small-scale goals (e.g., using a loop) 5) mastering the pragmatics of programming: learning the skill to specify, develop, test and debug a program using the available tools.
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