Abstract
Programming is one of the most important aspects of a Computing course. Teaching programming is a challenging task due to a number of factors, ranging from lack of student problem solving skills to different teaching methods. This paper focuses on Maltese Computing teachers’ perspectives about the difficulties encountered when teaching programming to secondary school students in order to determine whether introducing programming to secondary school students through creating mobile-based games is an effective method to teach programming constructs. A resource pack consisting of various activities using MIT App Inventor 2 was created which incorporated constructivist approaches to teaching. This resource pack was reviewed by the teachers and their feedback was collected by means of a case study. The teachers agreed that developing mobile-based games would be highly stimulating to their students but there were uncertainties how this would affect students with different learning abilities and due to a general lack of computational thinking and problem-solving skills by most students.
Highlights
Programming is a skill which several students find difficult to grasp when studying Computing at secondary school level
One of the main reasons identified in literature is that students have a lack of problem solving skills (Apiola & Tedre, 2012) and computational thinking training, both of which are essential to learning programming language concepts which can be applied to various programming languages (Chetty & Barlow-Jones, 2014)
An issue that dominated the teacher workshops was the choice of programming language that one should introduce programming to students with, in particular whether a blocks-based programming language or a text-based programming language would be more appropriate
Summary
Programming is a skill which several students find difficult to grasp when studying Computing at secondary school level. The way that programming is taught in schools affects how students perceive programming and their later ability to understand and use the programming concepts learnt to solve problems. Busuttil a programming language encounters the barrier that second natural languages face in the way that they are taught. Two such obstacles include the focus on writing code instead of reading code and the focus on syntax rather than proper application of the language (Robertson, Lee, & Miller, 1995)
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