Teaching Programming for High School Students - IEEE Computer ...

Session F1J

Teaching Programming for High School Students: A Distance Education Experience Mariana R. do Nascimento, Andréa P. Mendonça, Dalton D. S. Guerrero, Jorge C. A. de Figueiredo System and Computing Department - Federal University of Campina Grande - Brazil [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract - Recently, in spite of the growing demand worldwide for professionals in computing, statistic data have revealed a decreasing number of students taking up this area. Given the importance of this field to economic growth and technological development, it is essential to support actions which will encourage students to consider computing as a career. In this article, we describe an experience with a distance programming course given to Brazilian high school students. The results showed that 94% of the students that completed the course were successful in the exams. The dropout rate in this course was high, mainly because students were young, and had difficulties in self-management of their activities. This work brings important contributions: it develops programming and problem solving skills in high school students, it presents the design of a distance programming course for high school students and it contributes to research and actions in distance education. Index Terms – CS enrollments, Digital Natives, Distance Education, High School Students, Programming. INTRODUCTION According to the literature [1]-[4], it is noticeable the growing number of opportunities for computer professionals. However, data from countries such as Germany, Brazil, Canada and the United States show a decrease in the number of students enrolled for courses related to computing in recent years [5]-[8]. Considering the fact that Computing plays an important role on the world scenario in terms of economic and technological development as well as in the execution of daily activities, it has become necessary to foster initiatives that will divulge Computing as a possible career. One such initiative would be to offer opportunities to high school students to become engaged in this area, since many of these students are still undecided in their choice of a profession. One of theses opportunities is to engage students in programming activities. In Brazil, for example, is uncommon the programming teaching in the high school. So, a programming course was offered to high school students in a northeastern Brazilian city. To grant students from different schools full access to the course, making it possible for them to reconcile it with other activities

(school, language school, leisure, etc.), the programming course was offered at a distance, allowing the students to work out more flexible schedules. Although distance education is a form of education whose main characteristic is that of flexibility, it does require, on the part of students, greater ability in carrying out self-management activities and in scheduling their time to perform these activities. These skills represent a challenge for people who are still in high school. So, besides the usual challenge of teaching programming [9]-[10], the course had to overcome other challenges, such as dealing with the so-called "digital native" [11] who is more accustomed to using technology for entertainment, and to guide him/her with programming course activities in conjunction with other activities. These challenges have had an impact on decisions concerning the design of the course as regards, for example, the type of tutoring and feedback provided, and the tools used for interaction. The sections of this paper are organized as follows. Section 2 presents the course design. Section 3 presents the research questions that were addressed in order to enable better observation of the course. Section 4 presents the results, which are discussed in Section 6. Related works are presented in Section 7, followed by conclusions. COURSE DESIGN This section describes the course design, covering its subjects and organization, its public, the tools adopted, teachers and coordinators’ responsibilities, and the tutoring strategy as well as the adopted evaluation criteria. I. Programming Subject Being the first edition, the course was designed to be a month-long, focused on the basic elements of introductory programming. Python was the programming language chosen, on account of its easy syntax and its great potential for developing different applications, like games. Moreover, Python is the language adopted by the Computer Science course of the Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG), the institution responsible for this distance course. The subjects covered during the course were allocated as shown in Table I.

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Session F1J TABLE I WEEKLY ALLOCATION OF SUBJECTS Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Subjects Python Shell X Values, types, variables X and expressions Programs X Functions X Conditionals X Loops with while X Loops with for Formating Strings

Week 4

II. Tools Adopted

X X

Each subject was teaching in one-lesson, and each lesson was made up of one or more video-lessons, script, list of exercises, and reading references. The video-lessons were screencasts of spoken presentations on slides, in which both conceptual and practical basis were addressed. Each video lasted no more than 10 minutes, in view of time constraints imposed by the hosting service (Youtube). Besides, the goal of the course was to provide instruction in a way that would not be exhausting for the students. The scripts represented directed studies, about which the students were to give a brief written explanation on the lesson, answering questions about it soon afterwards. The lists of exercises contained a set of programming problems to be solved by the students. In total, it was released seven lists of exercises. Reading references were made up of Internet links or supporting book1 chapters, made available online in PDF, as a complement to what was taught in the lesson. As seen in Table I, two lessons a week were given. The students had about three days to complete the activities of each lesson. II. The Students The course public consisted of students in the 2nd year of high school, aged between 15 and 18. The course was made available to students from two schools, one private and one public, in Campina Grande - Paraiba, Brazil. The students from both schools did not have any knowledge of computer programming. Those who were interested in taking up the course had to answer a questionnaire in order to be selected. The selection criteria used were: lack of experience in programming, age varying from 15 to18, reports of few extra activities outside school, Internet access and to have a computer at home. From the 182 students who answered the questionnaire, 40 were selected according to the criteria mentioned above. The characteristics of these students can be seen as follows: i) average age of approximately 16.6; ii) 62.5% of them came from public schools and iii) 80% of the class consisted of boys. The small number of students in this class, compared to the number of students who most typically make up a distance learning course, was due to the fact that this was 1

the first edition of the course, having only volunteer tutors to follow up and assist the students. The high school students have grown up amid new technologies and has been using computers, videogames, music players, webcams, cell phones and other digital tools. The familiarity in handling all types of software makes the digital natives more demanding and more in need of freedom to use the services to which they are accustomed. They can feel dejected, for instance, if they were demanded to adopt the services available on others virtual environments e.g., WebCT and Moodle. For this reason no Virtual Learning Environment was adopted in the present course. Instead, we used a small set of tools to provide communication functions, coordination and collaboration among the course’s participants. These tools were: Youtube, GoogleForms, GoogleGroups, and GoogleDocs, and Hoopaloo. Youtube is a site for hosting videos of up to 100MB with a maximum duration of 10 minutes. This service was used to host the course’s video-lessons. GoogleForms is a tool associated to GoogleDocs for creating and submitting online forms. The forms created with GoogleForms were either questionnaires or contained questions regarding the scripts or the lists of exercises. GoogleGroups is a mailing list, accessible to all people who have a Google Account. It was used to send/receive emails to/from coordination/teachers to students, and emails from students. GoogleDocs is a service for creating, editing and sharing documents and spreadsheets. It was adopted in order to maintain shared data on students, class attendance and grades, allowing the education staff and the coordination to update, instantaneously, the data made available to others. Hoopaloo is a system developed by the Federal University of Campina Grande for submitting Python programs and executing unit tests, previously registered, offering through e-mail an immediate feedback from the results of the tests over the programs submitted by the students. III. Teachers and Coordinators A video-lessons recording was done by two teachers from the UFCG Computer Science Course. On the other hand, the coordinators, graduate students in Computer Science from the same institution, were responsible for managing the course, performing activities such as registration of students on the mailing list, publication of the lessons in the course website, e-mail newsletters, training and monitoring tutors and so on. IV. Tutoring A group of 10 students from the UFCG Computer Science Course formed the tutoring team, working as volunteers. They were given four hours a week for online assistance (synchronously) aimed at clarifying the doubts of the

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python


Session F1J

V. Evaluation Criteria Three types of evaluations made up the final grade. These were: lists of exercises, the theoretical and practical tests; the latter being taken face-to-face. To be approved, students must obtain a final average grade equal or above 5.0. Equation (1) shows how the final average (FA) of course was calculated (consider the symbol "μ" as the function that returns to the average).

,

0.8

1, 2, … , 7

0.2

(1)

Where, TT and PT are the grades given to the theoretical and practical tests, respectively. And L1, L2, ..., L7 are the grades given to the lists of exercises. It can be observed that greater weight was given to the exams in relation to the grades of the lists of exercise: 80%. This was due to the fact that, in practice, students could get help from different sources (Internet, friends, etc…), while the face-toface evaluation guarantee that the grade obtained resulted from the student's knowledge. RESEARCH QUESTIONS In order to evaluate the course and make the adjustments needed for future editions of it, the following research questions were addressed: (RQ1) What are the results of the course regarding the effectiveness of distance learning to high school students? (RQ2) Do the tools adopted offer adequate support to the course? (RQ3) What are the students’ impressions regarding the teaching staff and the didactic material adopted? (RQ4) Which are the main difficulties of teaching programming at a distance to high school students? RESULTS (QP1) What are the results of the course regarding the effectiveness of distance learning to high school students? Effectiveness can be regarded as a metric related not only to the student’s performance, but also to the dropout

rate noticed during the course. The results for these two factors are presented below. Droupout rate. We will consider the definition of evasion given by Maia and Meireles [11], who argue that evasion represents the percentage of students who do not complete courses or programs of study, including those who enroll but do not start the course. Thus, from the 40 students enrolled, 21 dropped out before or during the course, resulting in a dropout rate of 52.5%. Approval. The pass rate obtained from the 48.5% of students who held on to the course until the end, was 94.73%. Moreover, as shown in Figure 1, the average class grades obtained from the lists of exercises were always higher than 7.0, which reveals that the students had a good performance throughout the course. Similar to what happened with the lists of exercises, student performance, regarding theoretical and practical face-to-face evaluations, was equally satisfactory, with an average score of 7.7 and 7.29 with standard deviations of 1.23 and 2.66, respectively.

Class mean

students. They were also given an average of two hours a week to correct the lists of exercises and to make an evaluation of the programs created by the students. For this evaluation, besides giving the grade, tutors were supposed to identify errors in the students’ programs, show the correct way of overcoming these errors, and give tips on coding style. Each tutor, initially, was responsible for monitoring a group of four students, having to offer brief reports on the students’ progress, recording his/her observations on to an online spreadsheet shared by all tutors, teachers and coordinators. The purpose of this approach was to increase control over students in order to monitor them as to their motivation to hold on to the course, their evolution and learning difficulties as well as to consolidate a trustful relationship between students and tutors, shortening the distance between them.

15.00 10.00

8.08

9.75 9.20

7.06

8.67 7.16 8.97

5.00 0.00 L1

L2

L3

L4

L5

L6

L7

Exercises Lists FIGURE 1 GRADE AVERAGE CLASS FROM THE LIST OF EXERCISES.

(QP2) Do the tools adopted offer adequate support to the course? The tools were evaluated by the students as to how easy they were to use, how handy they were for the proposed activities, and how recommendable they were for use in future editions of the course. The students evaluated the tools by considering how easy and adequate they were to use, with most (always above 50%) of the opinions oscillating between "very easy" and "easy", and “very appropriate" and "appropriate", respectively, as shown in Tables II and III. The students approved the use of tools, recommending, (well above 60%) that these should to be adopted in future editions of the course. This shows how comfortable the students were to use the technology which was so close to their day-to-day realities. Among the tools which went through some more critical evaluation, there was the Hoopaloo (system for sending programs and running tests on these programs). This was due to the fact that the students could not understand how the tests registered in the Hoopaloo worked, and how advantageous a system like this was to provide ever so quick feedback. This can be deduced from the comments made by students, such as:


Session F1J "Unfortunately, many of my classmates reported errors which occurred when they were trying to send the answers through the Hoopaloo system; after all, as people think differently from one another, they create different programs ... How can a tool analyze a program taking for grant a "fixed” response!?(...)"

Very Easy Forms Groups Hoopaloo Youtube

62.5% 56.25% 43,75% 56.25%

TABLE II EASE OF USE OF TOOLS Easy Neither Easy nor Difficult 31.25% 6.25% 37.5% 6.25% 25% 31.25% 18.75% 18.75%

Difficult

Very Difficult

0% 0% 0% 6.25%

0% 0% 0% 0%

TABLE III ADEQUACY IN THE USE OF TOOLS Very Approp. Neither Inapprop. Approp. Approp. nor Inapprop. 56.25% 43.75% 0% 0% Forms 56.25% 31.25% 12.5% 0% Groups 6.25% 50% 6.25% 31.25% Hoopaloo 25% 50% 18.75% 6.25% Youtube

Very Approp. 0% 0% 6.25% 0%

(QP3) What are the students’ impressions regarding the teaching staff and the didactic material adopted? In addition to the tools, the students have also given their opinions about the didactic material and the teaching staff of the course. In Table IV we can see that the views of students about the educational material used in the course have been very positive, with some exception only with respect to the supporting book, perhaps because the students were not accustomed to reading books online. As to the teaching staff, most students considered satisfactory/adequate the way the teachers discussed the subjects in the videos-lessons (81.25%). They considered “very good” or “good” the performance of the course coordination (87.5%); they considered “very good” the tutors’ knowledge about the subject (81.25%); they said that the tutors used up the assistance online hours (62.5%); they agreed that the feedback from tutors was “good” (68.75%); and they also agreed that the tutors-students interaction was “good” (75%). (QP4) Which are the main difficulties of teaching programming at a distance to high school students? Resistance to follow a learning cycle. The learning cycle established involved the following activities: watch the video-lessons, answer the script questions, read the supporting book and afterwards, do the list of exercises. However, it was observed that the students were reluctant to read the supporting book. Furthermore, because the scripts were not liable to grades, the students turned their attention away from them, going straight to the list of exercises. By skipping steps in the learning cycle that has been suggested (video lesson, script, book and list of exercises), students

found it more difficult to solve the problems which were proposed. TABLE IV STUDENTS’ ASSESSMENT OF THE DIDATIC MATERIAL Very Good Neither Bad Very Good Good Bad neither Bad 12.5% 25% 43.75% 18.75% 0% Book 12.5% 81.25% 6.25% 0% 0% Scripts 31.25% 50% 18.75% 0% 0% Videos 12.5% 75% 12.5% 0% 0% Exercises

Submissions at the end of the deadline. Students tended to send their answers on the last day of submission. Figure 2 illustrates this, showing the number of submissions for each question of the third list of exercises, in terms of days (from 10 to 13 October). The submission time was opened on OCT/10 and closed on 13/Out. Although some answers have been sent from Oct/10 to Oct/12, the largest concentration occurred on the last day of submission, causing an overload of work for the tutors, who had to clarify all doubts. It is important to notice that a program could be submited more than one time. The last submission was considered for evaluation purpose.

13/Oct Question 5

12/Oct

Question 4

11/Oct

Question 3

10/Oct

Question 2 0

20

40

60

Question 1

Number of Submissions FIGURE 2 CONCENTRATION OF SUBMISSIONS ON THE LAST SUBMISSION DAY

Unsatisfactory use of discussion list. One could see that the students made little use of the discussion list to clarify their doubts or discuss the lessons. In general, doubts were directly clarified by the tutor via chat or email. Lack of a repository of digital content. The students felt the need for a greater number of examples that would illustrate the full programming cycle: from the reading of problem statements, passing through intermediate solutions up to final completion. To illustrate, let us consider the following two comments from the students. “The video-classes were very good; ONLY THAT I think there should be more problem solving examples." "(...) I only think there should be more complex examples, involving more complex solutions, in the videos."


Session F1J This reinforces the need for building a repository of digital content to better meet students’ requirements. DISCUSSION OF RESULTS In spite of the fact that the dropout rate from the course has drawn some attention, according to a survey conducted in Brazil in 2005 [12] concerning the dropout rate in higher distance education, the courses which were conducted fully at a distance showed a 30% evasion rate, as opposed to those courses that were not conducted fully at a distance, which exhibited a dropout rate of 8%. On the other hand, the courses certified by the Brazilian Education Ministry (MEC) have shown a 21% dropout rate; whereas, in courses without a MEC certification i.e. those courses that run on their own certification, dropout reaches 62%. This programming course is included in the last classification, having presented an evasion of 52.5%, i.e. below the 62% stipulated by the above mentioned survey. The chats worked very well making it possible synchronous communication between tutors and students because they created an informal and personal environment for the students to express themselves most comfortably. However, a big problem concerning the use of chats is the fact that students are given a diversity of bandwidth choices, which would be difficult for some of them to receive video streams and audio material comfortably. The students have showed some resistance to the use of Hoopaloo. Several remarks made during the course and even on the evaluation questionnaire have showed that students failed to understand that the system tested the programs based on inputs and outputs, but they believed that the program had to correspond to a certain "standard response". This calls for better explanation of what a test based on input and output data is, and how it works. One would also need to explain what Hoopaloo is, and what their feedback messages are. As to the service offered by YouTube, which comprises the hosting of video-lessons, the main drawback lies in the fact that all videos posted on this site should not exceed 10 minutes, which renders lesson preparation most difficult; either to make lessons fit the time allotted or to edit and cut the visual material into several parts without damaging explanations and examples. High school students, who represent the public of our course, prefer media like: video, audio or something interactive, rather than texts or lecture notes. This explains why students skip steps along the learning cycle. This is especially true of those tasks which demand reading from a text format. As a result, during the time tutors were busy helping them online, they found out that students’ doubts could be quickly remedied by the explanations found in the book and scripts handed to them. Another typical behavior among students had to do with their dependence on tutors till the last day of assignment submission. This overcharged tutors, who were unable to give the same attention to all students. There were also problems of suspected plagiarism involving some of the programs submitted, but this practice

was discouraged by the teaching staff. However, as the course was short, we could not take any action to curb plagiarism. In future editions of the course, each tutor will be responsible for correcting all programs referring to a problem proposed, and be able to detect copies more easily. RELATED WORK In this section we present some related work on programming teaching for high school students, be it faceto-face or distance teaching. The work presented in [13] describes the DASK project (DAtakunskap i SKolan, Computer Science in Schools) which aims to introduce computer science to Swedish-speaking high school students by providing university level computer science courses on the web and thus, decreasing the gap between high school and university by giving a realistic view of computer science . The courses provided by DASK cover the subjects of programming, logic, and computer hardware. All course material was made available on the web using the course management system Moodle. Similarly to this work, the DASK project there was individual feedback for assignments to all students on a weekly basis. In [14] is presented the ITEST project (NFS Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers) that aims the professional development of teachers to teach computing for K-12 students. A pilot program was developed by a partnership between a university and its nearby school districts of Virginia Beach. The course material was based on the textbook titled “Learning to Program with Alice”. The course was carried out entirely face-to-face, and focused on programming concepts and codification. Comprising 14 units where everyone was finished with a programming project, which scope was more complex than the programming exercises. According to the authors, this project provided a significant increase in the number of students taking the advanced placement (AP) tests in Computer Science at Virginia Beach schools. In [15], the author describes a project titled CyberTechI which was meant to attract young boys and girls AfricanAmericans and Hispanics ethnics to take up computing as a career. The first 75 hours of CyberTechI were online with professors from the State University of Kennesaw (KSU). The course contemplated problem solving, algorithms, programming, software and hardware, among other topics. The approval rate was 78%, and the comparison between pre-tests and post-tests revealed high learning levels. Although similar regarding the adoption of distance education as a mechanism to educate young people on computing, the CyberTechI differs from the course described in this paper in two fundamental aspects: (i) the CyberTechI was given partly at a distance and partly faceto-face. While the course described in this paper was given entirely at a distance; (ii) the CyberTechI used the Blackboard as virtual learning environment, whereas the course described in this article adopted a set of tools to help in the teaching-learning process.


Session F1J Other works with K-12 students were presented in [1617]. These courses promoted computing and programming teaching projects that don’t follow a regular classes planning.

Costa, Nathan V. de Melo, Tales of T. S. Pimentel, Victor da C. L. Freire).

CONCLUSIONS

[1] Caetano, R. (2008) Computerworld homepage on UOL. [Online]. Available: http://computerworld.uol.com.br/carreira/2008/07/03/futuro-de-ti-no-brasilesta-em-xeque-por-falta-de-profissionais/.

The main objective of this distance course was to impart some knowledge about Computing to high school students, by means of an activity most typical in a computing career: programming. Results showed that 25% of the students, who answered the final questionnaire for course evaluation, intended to take up Computer Science Course, 56.25% stated that they had affinity with the area or with programming activities, and the remaining did not answer on the subject. Although these results do not guarantee that students will ingress in the Computer Science Course undergraduate, we were able to divulge this area, and make it more familiar to students. Moreover, the students developed skills in problem solving and development of logical reasoning. It is possible that a face-to-face course had a better chance in decreasing dropout rates. However, it would be inappropriate to students that have a restrict schedule, as was our case. The design of the course is, in a sense, quite different from other distance learning courses, in which there is always the adoption of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Through this experience, we have demonstrated that the presence of a VLE is not a prerequisite for the support of a distance learning course. From here, it is possible to build up several courses, with a variety of supportive tooling, caring for the peculiarities of each institution, location or public. As future work, there will be a new version of our programming distance course. This time at the undergraduate student’s level, covering the entire subjects of the programming discipline for novices (variables, loop, functions, conditionals, etc.). The course will be offered by the Federal University of Campina Grande and will allow the students approved for the second academic semester of the Computer Science Course to anticipate this discipline on their first academic semester. We estimate that the whole design of the course, its tutoring strategy, as well as all the material produced, will be made available to the community of educators and students, fostering thereby the implementation of distance learning courses by other institutions in the area of programming or in some other related areas. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors wish to thank CAPES for their invaluable support which made this course possible as part of a master's thesis (COPIN/DSC/UFCG), and the following 10 Computer Science students who acted as volunteer tutors during the implementation of this study: (Alexander B. M. Medeiros Caio MC Paes, Delano H. Oliveira, Izabela V. de A. Melo, Helder Alves RR, Janderson JB Aguiar, Larissa N.

REFERENCES

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