Antti-Jussi Lakanen

K-12 game programming course concept using textual programming

Several programming environments have been constructed to facilitate novice programming at K-12 and CS0/CS1 levels. The environments can be roughly divided into those using visual or textual programming. This paper presents a K-12 game programming course concept based on textual programming. The concept is based on an easy-to-use C# library, called Jypeli, built on top of Microsoft XNA Framework. The library tries to maintain advantages of visual programming and avoid challenges of textual programming. In particular, the library helps beginners to program their first games in a short period of time and without a heavy syntactic load. The course concept and an initial evaluation consisting of student feedback and a literature rationale are presented.

Five years of game programming outreach: understanding student differences

This paper presents lessons learned from five years of teaching a five-day game design and programming outreach course. The course was offered in summer time and targeted at middle and high school students. In total, 462 youngsters have taken part in 21 course instances. We describe our course concept, and discuss our successes and challenges. In particular, we focus on understanding our student populations by presenting descriptives and statistics of the events, and performing a statistical cluster analysis based on pre- and post-surveys. The cluster analysis was complemented with an analysis of the qualitative data, also originating from the surveys. Taken together, students could be classified into five groups with substantial differences: Enthusiasts, Newbies, Uncertains, Experimenters, and Unsatisfieds. Awareness of the clusters helps instructors of similar courses in developing course content, designing differentiated instruction, and planning follow-up or advanced courses.

A Practice for Providing Additional Support in CS1

This paper reports on a practice used for providing additional support to beginner programmers. This practice emphasizes low social barriers to learning, differentiated instruction, and revision. Altogether we try to avoid defensiveness or stigmatization among those who face difficulties. Student feedback indicates their acceptance of this approach while teaching assistants report that helping students in need of additional support improve their teaching skills. Further, we have observed indications of improved student performance. We describe the practice and suggest a particular educational constructionism, i.e., how students construct their social identities within a particular school setting, as an explanation for our positive experiences. As a conclusion, we stress the importance of support implemented through differentiated instruction and informed by constructionism as a CS1 research topic.

Towards Computer-based Exams in CS1.

Even though IDEs are often a central tool when learning to program in CS1, many teachers still lean on paperbased exams. In this study, we examine the “test mode effect” in CS1 exams using the Rainfall problem. The test mode was two-phased. Half of the participants started working on the problem with pen and paper, while the other half had access to an IDE. After submitting their solution, all students could rework their solution on an IDE. The experiment was repeated twice during subsequent course instances. The results were mixed. From the marking perspective, there was no statistically significant difference resulting from the mode. However, the students starting with the paper-based part tended to make more errors in their code, but after the computer-based reworking phase, they matched or exceeded the level of the students who started with the computer-based phase. We also discuss the reliability of automatic assessment that is based on a unit test suite that was developed for the purposes of this study.