Educational Programming Environment Research Articles

Educational Programming Environments for Enhancing Conceptual Design in the Object-Oriented Paradigm: A Systematic Mapping Study

Teaching and learning programming, and especially Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), is a complicated and challenging task. Students have to comprehend various OOP concepts and utilize them for designing object-oriented programs. Various types of educational programming environments, such as microworlds and educational games, have been devised for supporting novices mainly in comprehending OOP concepts. However, such environments do not usually support students in the conceptual design of object-oriented programs of a considerable length and complexity. In this paper, we focus on a systematic mapping study (SMS) of educational programming environments for enhancing the conceptual design in OOP, which relies on modularity, abstraction and encapsulation. The research questions investigate the intended learning outcomes, the empirical evidence on the effectiveness, and the teaching/learning technologies used by educational programming environments for enhancing the conceptual design in OOP. The findings can support instructors in selecting appropriate tools for their courses and researchers in the field of educational programming environments for OOP.

Effects of a Block-Based Scaffolded Tool on Students’ Introduction to Hierarchical Data Structures

<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Contribution:</i> In this article, the authors present findings and insights on the efficacy of using an educational block-based programming (BBP) environment—Blocks4DS, to teach the binary search tree (BST). <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</i> For a decade, BBP environments have been a hot topic in the computer science education (CSEd) community to promote interactive active learning of programming. However, little attention has been paid to BBP environments’ efficacy on nonintroductory courses like data structures and algorithms (DS&A). DS&A courses are challenging to students due to levels of abstraction that could be reduced by syntax-free features existing in BBP interfaces. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research Questions:</i> 1) Can undergraduate computing-major students learn about the BST using Blocks4DS? 2) Do undergraduate computing-major students understand better BSTs when learning with a BBP environment? and 3) How do undergraduate computing-major students perceive Blocks4DS for nonintroductory computer science (CS) topics? <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</i> A mixed-method study was designed, using a control and intervention group with 83 first and second-year CS students, to evaluate the efficacy of Blocks4DS compared to traditional instructional methods (e.g., whiteboard and pseudocode). The authors evaluated its efficacy based on students’ conceptual understanding and perceptions. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Findings:</i> It was found that, regardless of prior experience with text-based programming languages and instructional approaches, students introduced to the BST with Blocks4DS gained significant conceptual understanding, and performed as well as peers instructed with pseudocode. Also, 83.3% of students found the tool engaging and 72.3% found it useful to learn DS&A. This suggests that Blocks4DS can be used to teach DS&A.

Impact of a Scratch programming intervention on student engagement in a Nigerian polytechnic first-year class: verdict from the observers

An engaging first programming class (CS1) often inspires students’ passion for computer science (CS). However, the evidence in the literature suggests that the average CS1 classes are anything but engaging for many students. The performance of CS compared to other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses in international student engagement surveys seems to substantiate CS1 failure, attrition rates, and lack of diversity in most CS classes. Meanwhile, for its simplicity in introducing programming to beginners, primary and secondary schools use Scratch, an educational programming environment developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. For the same reason, higher institutions now include some forms of Scratch instruction in CS1. The question remains, to what extent is Scratch engaging, especially for students in higher education? This study addressed this gap by observing college computer science students exposed to a constructionist Scratch programming pedagogy. We adopted a descriptive design based on quantitative observations. To observe the class during a weekly 2-hour session, we employed five CS educators, one observer per week. Each observer, employing a 20-item observation protocol, rated the extent of affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement of first-year CS students in a polytechnic in North Central Nigeria. Most of the students were learning to program for the first time. Analysis of the data showed a significant agreement in the ratings of the five observers for overall student engagement, although the impact was moderate. However, while agreement in their ratings for affective engagement was significant, with a large effect, there was no significant concordance in their ratings for behavioral engagement. Observers also significantly agreed in their ratings for cognitive engagement; however, the impact was moderate. These findings suggest that employing Scratch in higher education can be engaging and useful, especially for students with no prior programming experience.

Collaborative versus individual problem solving in computational thinking through programming: A meta‐analysis

AbstractComputational thinking (CT), which is a cognitive skill used to solve problems with computational solutions, has drawn increasing attention among researchers and practitioners due to the growing recognition of CT competence as a 21st century skill. Collaboration is commonly integrated into CT education to facilitate novice learning, but there is inadequate knowledge regarding the influences of collaboration in CT education. This meta‐analysis examined the overall effects on the cognitive, social and affective competencies of collaborative versus individual problem solving in CT through programming. We identified 33 publications involving 4717 learners, which allowed for 220 effect size comparisons. We found a medium effect size (Hedges' g = 0.562; p &lt; 0.001) in favour of collaborative problem solving on cognitive learning outcomes and a small effect size (Hedges' g = 0.316; p &lt; 0.01) on affective learning outcomes using a random‐effects model. Categorical moderator analysis revealed the moderating effects of educational level, programming environment, study duration, grouping method and group size. The competency model that was generated from the synthesized literature on collaborative computational problem solving yielded insights into the learning design and assessment of relevant activities. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about the topic? Although professional programming usually requires collaboration to accomplish common goals in the work environment, programming is predominantly taught on an individual basis in educational settings. Some intervention studies have reported inconsistent learning outcomes (positive and negative) from integrating collaborative problem solving (CPS) into programming education. There is a need for further scrutiny and exploration of the role of collaboration in the process of learning to program. What does this paper add? Our meta‐analysis showed that CPS is an effective pedagogical tool for developing students' cognitive, affective and social competencies. The moderator analysis revealed that CPS in programming has cognitive benefits irrespective of grouping method, group size and educational levels; however, there is a need for caution in regard to designing collaborative problem‐solving activities for different programming environments and durations. The model generated from the literature synthesis can yield insights into better assessing and designing collaborative problem‐solving activities. Implications for practice and/or policy? Integrating CPS into programming education can prepare students with 21st century skills. Social and affective competencies are crucial to students' learning capacity, which is an issue that needs to be better assessed. Future studies could look more rigorously into the effects of CPS in visual programming and robotics programming among younger age groups, such as primary or middle school students.

Using Greenfoot as a Tool for Serious Games Programming Education and Development

Greenfoot is an educational programming environment that aims to motivate students in learning object-oriented programming (OOP) through the development of simple games and simulations. Several studies have presented positive results regarding the usage of Greenfoot as a tool for introducing novices to OOP. In this article, we propose using Greenfoot as a tool for introducing novices to (serious) games programming, as well as a tool for implementing serious games (SGs). As a proof of concept, the design and implementation of an SG for learning OOP utilizing Greenfoot and a survey on the perceptions of graduates that had been introduced to SGs programming with Greenfoot in the context of a relevant Master course are presented. The results show that Greenfoot, although not developed for this purpose, can be utilized both as a tool for introducing novices to (serious) games programming and as a tool for developing SGs.

Mediation of Knowledge Transfer in the Transition from Visual to Textual Programming

In education, we have noticed a significant gap between the ability of students to program in an educational visual programming environment and the ability to write code in a professional programming environment. The aim of our research was to verify the methodology of transition from visual programming of mobile applications in MIT App Inventor 2 to textual programming in the Android Studio using the Java Bridge tool as a mediator of knowledge transfer. We have examined the extent, to which students will be able to independently program own mobile applications after completing the transition from visual to textual programming using the mediator. To evaluate the performance of students, we have analysed qualitative data from teaching during 1 school year and determined the degree of achievement of educational goals according to Bloom’s taxonomy. The results suggest that students in the secondary education can acquire advanced skills in programming mobile applications in a professional programming environment, when they have knowledge of visual programming in an educational programming environment, and a suitable mediator is used to transfer such knowledge into a new context.

An object-oriented educational programming environment for AI speakers.

An object-oriented educational programming environment for AI speakers.

Возможности использования среды программирования Scratch на первой ступени школьного обучения (к постановке проблемы)

The article discusses approaches to the use of the Scrath programming environment in the educational process of primary school. The methodological manuals of S.N. Tur, T.P. Bokuchava, O. N. Burtaeva, describing the methodology for teaching programming, and various educational programming environments: LightBot, Little Wizzard, RoboMind. The possibilities that open up when using the Scrath programming environment in solving the problems of forming information literacy of younger students, organizing their educational research activities, as well as positive socialization are evaluated.

Teaching basic of programming with the elements of Scratch - evaluation of VBA programming course for logistics students

Digital nations have become dependent on computer applications. One of the most important part of literacy in today’s digital and connected word are the basics of computer applications development and usage, but also algorithmic thinking. Programmers, developers, analysts are very wanted resource in business, administration and educational organizations. Job portals contain a lot of well-paid job offers for developers, data scientists, knowledge engineers or robotic process automation developers. Still more and more specialists in these areas are needed not only by IT market but also other sectors of the economy. Therefore, schools and universities introduce many courses concerning process modeling, developing, programming and customizing applications used in management, finance, logistics or engineering. Programming seems to be quite difficult to learn, therefore several educational programming environments and the new easier languages like visual programming languages were developed, so that more people, not necessarily specialists, could create new IT tools and speed up development of the information society.The aim of the article is to present the role of visual programming languages like Scratch in encouraging university students to create algorithms and start programming. The paper presents the characteristic of Scratch visual programming language, the framework of VBA programming course with elements of Scratch. It contains also students’ opinions about learning the basics of programming with visual programming language. In the main part of the article the author presents the results of the survey that was at conducted at the beginning of 2019 on a group of Polish Master’s students (n=119) The author’s observation and students’ opinions allow to conclude that Scratch is very easy to access and to use. It makes introduction to programming more enjoyable, helps to concentrate on the problem, solution structure, and the flow of the process. Scratch platform is not an ideal tool, however it allows for faster introduction of new elements of programming languages such as variables, loops, code blocks, objects. Finally, visual programming languages thanks to its easiness and quickly visible final effect (working application) encourages students to self-development in the field of computer programming. Performed research indicates also that business students notice the benefits of knowing basics of programing, they would like to attend basic programing classes. Students acquire knowledge and skills mainly performing instructions received from the teacher (86%) and watching video tutorials. The comparative analysis showed also some differences between various groups of students. Therefore, tools like Scratch can be successfully used to develop IT courses for non-majors. Many advantages make Scratch useful in introductory programming courses prepared for business students that frequently had no prior experience in the area of IT applications development.

LearnBlock: A Robot-Agnostic Educational Programming Tool

Education is evolving to prepare students for the current sociotechnical changes. An increasing effort to introduce programming and other STEM-related subjects into the core curriculum of primary and secondary education is taking place around the world. The use of robots stands out among STEM initiatives, since robots are proving to be an engaging tool for learning programming and other STEM-related contents. Block-based programming is the option chosen for most educational robotic platforms. However, many robotics kits include their own software tools, as well as their own set of programming blocks. LearnBlock, a new educational programming tool, is proposed here. Its major novelty is its loosely coupled software architecture which makes it, to the best of our knowledge, the first robot-agnostic educational tool. Robot-agnosticism is provided not only in block code, but also in generated code, unifying the translation from blocks to the final programming language. The set of blocks can be easily extended implementing additional Python functions, without modifying the core code of the tool. Moreover, LearnBlock provides an integrated educational programming environment that facilitates a progressive transition from a visual to a general-purpose programming language. To evaluate LearnBlock and demonstrate that it is platform-agnostic, several tests were conducted. Each of them consists of a program implementing a robot behaviour. The block code of each test can run on several educational robots without changes.

Overview of the Computer Programming Learning Environments for primary education

Over the past decade, the assessment of the general educational value of computer programming and computational thinking has been constantly increasing and, as a result, they are introduced to increasingly younger ages. In parallel, educational programming environments are significantly progressing, providing a variety of options for different ages. This paper presents an overview of the modern learning programming environments for primary education and proposes a classification system with categories corresponding to the technological and educational dimensions of the area. The paper aims to support teachers in learning design for the interdisciplinary approach of programming and the development of computational thinking.

The construction of spatial awareness in early childhood: the effect of an educational scenario-based programming environment

A teaching intervention – educational scenario – was implemented by educators to 306 pre-schoolers in 17 classrooms. It was designed to foster children’s spatial awareness so as to help them construct a model of spatial concepts with reference to a mobile object around the space, the programmable toy Bee-Bot. The educational scenario encompasses instruments designed for gathering data of the pre and post children’s representations about direction and orientation concepts, the teaching activities conceived to deliver these concepts by using the programmable toy and finally instruments designed for evaluation. The evaluation took place after three weeks implementation and the results indicated statistically significant difference in children’s pre and post-test intervention representations and consequently construction of spatial knowledge not only to a functional context but moreover to a more symbolic one.

Lock-step simulation is child's play (experience report)

Implementing multi-player networked games by broadcasting the player’s input and letting each client calculate the game state -- a scheme known as *lock-step simulation* – is an established technique. However, ensuring that every client in this scheme obtains a consistent state is infamously hard and in general requires great discipline from the game programmer. The thesis of this pearl is that in the realm of functional programming – in particular with Haskell's purity and static pointers – this hard problem becomes almost trivially easy. We support this thesis by implementing lock-step simulation under very adverse conditions. We extended the educational programming environment CodeWorld, which is used to teach math and programming to middle school students, with the ability to create and run interactive, networked multi-user games. Despite providing a very abstract and high-level interface, and without requiring any discipline from the programmer, we can provide consistent lock-step simulation with client prediction.

IslayTouch: an educational visual programming environment for tablet devices

Educational programming languages are programming languages that have been designed for users without programming experience, with the purpose of teaching them the skill of logical thinking or as an introduction to regular programming languages. Although these languages are relatively easier for beginners, difficult concepts of regular programming languages are still being introduced into some of them. As a new approach to this problem, an educational visual programming environment called Islay has been developed, in which the concept of state-transition diagram is used to compose a program. As a result, Islay becomes even easier for beginners than some other educational programming languages. In this research, a new version of Islay is developed as an Android application, with more features being added and a new user interface that is suitable for tablet devices.

Translator of Islay 3D Animations into Flash Platform

The three-dimensional (3D) interactive animations and video games are so attractive that successful educational programming environments like Alice and Kodu Game Lab deal with 3D characters. Islay 3D is another educational programming environment of which feature is an intuitively comprehensive user interface in terms of state transition diagrams. Unfortunately its animation definition was too memory-hungry when played by the built-in interpreter. In this paper, we present a translator of the animation definitions of Islay 3D into ActionScript3 (AS3). Compiling the AS3 codes by way of Papervision3D, we obtain the 3D Flash animation file playable on the Flash platform. It will be shown that the memory and CPU usages will be much saved, quartered and halved, respectively, by virtue of the translator.

The design of a programming environment to support greater social awareness and participation in early computing courses

Given the growing and widespread use of online networking tools, coupled with learning theory's emphasis on learning through participation in a community, we believe there is good reason to pursue the development of educational programming environments that support increased interaction among learners. To that end, we have been exploring the design of a social programming environment to support students as they work on individual programming assignments, which are common in early computing courses. We present the design of OSBIDE, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) plug-in that supports many common features of networking environments, including an activity feed and a recommender system that identifies learners who have encountered similar programming issues. We describe the iterative refinement of OSBIDE through its multi-semester deployment in CS 1 and CS 2 courses. Preliminary results indicate that students are generally enthusiastic about the environment's ability to make programming more social. OSBIDE lays a strong foundation for future research into the relationships between learners' programming and activities, and their learning outcomes. It also has the potential to provide instructors with powerful resources for identifying and assisting struggling students.

Microworlds, games, animations, mobile apps, puzzle editors and more: What is important for an introductory programming environment?

Teaching and learning programming constitutes a challenge. Although several teaching approaches and programming tools have been proposed, it seems that they have limited impact on classroom practice. This article investigates students' perceptions on five educational programming environments that are widely used and the features that any introductory programming environment should have. The environments investigated are: BlueJ; objectKarel; Scratch; Alice; and MIT App inventor. These environments were studied and used by experienced undergraduate students of Informatics in the context of a fourth year course. The main features of the environments and the way of presenting them to students, as well as the assignments in the context of the course are presented, in order to help the reader realize what experience was gained by the students that evaluated the environments. Based on a questionnaire filled in by students interesting conclusions were drawn. Students identified the main features of the environments and evaluated them positively, although problems were identified. An introductory programming environment should engage students through the development of programs connected to their interests, such as games and mobile apps. Moreover, an ideal introductory programming environment should provide a simple and user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) that supports visualization of objects and classes, includes a puzzle-like editor for program development, reports simple and understandable error messages in natural language, and finally the ability to execute the program in a step by step manner. Although no single environment fulfils all these features, it seems that the most successful environment is Scratch.

Lessons from the Design of Three Educational Programming Environments

Educational programming systems are booming. More systems of this kind have been published in the last few years than ever before, and interest in this area is growing. With the rise of programming as a school subject in ever-younger age groups, the importance of dedicated educational systems for programming education is increasing. In the past, professional environments were often used in programming teaching; with the shift to younger age groups, this is no longer tenable. New educational systems are currently being designed by a diverse group of developing teams, in industry, in academia, and by hobbyists. In this paper, the author describes his experiences with the design of three systems—Blue, BlueJ, and Greenfoot—and extract lessons that he hopes may be useful for designers of future systems. He also discusses current developments, and suggests an area of interest where future work might be profitable for many users: the combination of aspects from block-based and text-based programming. The author briefly presents his work in this area—frame-based editing—and suggest possible future development options.

Influence of the familiarization with "scratch" on future teachers' opinions and attitudes about programming and ICT in education

Computer programming is considered a very important competence which is usually quite difficult to learn. Teaching computer programming to novices has to overcome important obstacles in order to be successful. The problem is even greater for non computer science majors. In order to overcome the difficulties and increase the rate of students that adopt positive views towards computer science, several educational programming environments have been proposed. Scratch educational programming environment offers innovative programming techniques and enables the rather easy development of games, animations, interactive stories etc. In this paper the effects of using Scratch in an introductory computer programming course for future teachers' attitudes and opinions are explored.

A proposal for teaching Object-Oriented Programming to undergraduate students

Various teaching approaches have been proposed for teaching Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) to novices. In this paper we present the results of studying students' conceptual grasp of OOP concepts in two distinct teachings based on the educational programming environments BlueJ and objectKarel. Also, students' replies regarding the effectiveness of objectKarel as a medium of introducing novices to OOP and preparing them for a transition to a conventional OOP language are presented. The main contribution of this paper relates to a new proposal for teaching OOP to undergraduate students, which is based on the combined use of objectKarel and BlueJ.