Dinh Thi Dong Phuong

Superior Factors to Predict Learning Status

This paper propose a method to predict learning status of current students from records of past students. It applies NMF to figure out motivation and learning strategies of students using behavior of students. An experiment has revealed the similarity of students is much higher in motivation and learning strategies than in behavior.

Graining and filling understanding gaps for novice programmers

Present programming education methods bring about many big gaps in understanding of many novice programmers. Novices suffering from big gaps in understanding would lose confidence to continue to learn programming. We introduce a method named AtoP to grain the big gaps into small gaps so that a novice can overcome the gaps. The method aims to associate programming with knowledge in many areas through interactive supervision and self-efficacy promotion.

Guidance of Farming Works to Improve Efficiency Considering Physical Behavior

New farmers need technical guidance to improve working efficiency because they are lacking in experience. Agricultural experts put much effort to provide guidance for beginner farmers. However, continuing to give guidance is difficult because it is a large burden on the experts. This study proposes a system which contributes to transferring a deft motion of experts to improve the working efficiency of beginners in farm works. The system promotes beginners to assess their own farming works without an expert. The beginners can confirm whether their own works are proper works. An experiment has suggested that machine learning can achieve judgement of the properness of farming works using state transition probability of each body part.

Estimating student persona through factorization of learning portfolio

Estimation of motivation and learning strategy of students is crucial for a teacher to engage them in programming. Let us consider a persona, which is a virtual student representing a student group similar in motivation and learning strategy to learn programming. Personas enable the teacher to predict student behavior during the programming education course. The paper proposes a method to figure out the weight each student belongs to a specific persona. It assumes students in a persona take similar learning behavior, even in different years. To determine how strongly each student learning in the current programming course belongs to a specific persona, it examines the similarity of her learning portfolio to that of past students. It decomposes a matrix of each student portfolio into the product of 2 matrices; a matrix representing the weight of each student belonging to every persona and a matrix of persona learning behavior, using the nonnegative-matrix factorization. This paper illustrates the method to figure out the matrices effectively.

Refining programming education course with absolute measures

This paper proposes a method to refine education contents with absolute measures. The measure is constructed based on the collective intelligence approach. The method values the motivation and the understanding of students. Operations, which are units of service in programming education courses are selected automatically to reduce refinement costs.

Encouraging Programming Learning for Novices with Grouping and Convincing Opinions

For students who begin to learn programming, there are quite a few difficulties to cope with. The best way to help these students is to provide adequate supervisors. However, in many universities, due to shortage of teachers, one teacher has to take care a big number of novices. When a student need helps, it often fails to reach the teacher because the teacher is being busy to supervise other students. Because the novices do not know how to continue their work, their motivation is degraded easily, which may makes them quit the class. To help the novices to be able to overcome difficulties right from the initial stage of programming learning, we propose a collaborative learning model regarding learners as opinion sources. It adopts a voting mechanism to improve the learning collaboration. Student are divided into small groups. They practice programming individually. A COOP point is voted to reward group members who have offered convincing opinions to others. COOP points are used as a measure of student contribution to group learning. A collaborative learning environment based on the model, Col-E, has been developed and applied for 50 students learning C programming language in Danang Educational University in Vietnam. The result shows that Col-E works well to improve programming ability and motivation of students.

Collaborative Learning Environment to Improve Novice Programmers with Convincing Opinions in Computer Room

The insufficiency of programming teaching staff in many universities of developing countries causes programming training in computer rooms to be ineffective. Only one teacher supervises many students in programming practice. Since tens of novice students need guidance because of their stuck in difficulties, the teacher is impossible to supervise all of them in a timely fashion. To solve the problem, we propose a collaborative learning model using a voting mechanism. Student are divided into small groups. They practice programming individually. A COOP point is voted to reward group members who have offered convincing opinions to others. COOP points are used as a measure of a student contribution to group learning. A collaborative learning environment based on the model, Col-E, has been developed and applied for 50 students learning C programming language in Danang Educational University in Vietnam. The result shows that Col-E works well to improve programming ability and motivation of students.

Programming Skill Transfer from Experienced to Novices with Animated Diagrams

It is widely recognized that algorithm visualization and individual supervision are effective to educate programming skills to novices. This paper proposes an animated diagram as a media to satisfy both of them. An animated diagram is a record of drawings associates source codes and figures. It enables novice students to review the process of individual supervision of experienced programmers drawing diagrams. The record is also available for analysis of faults in teaching methods and materials. The Supervision Sheet is developed as a software tool to realize animated diagrams. Animated diagrams has been used for individual supervision in an actual exercise classes. Novice students who refer animated diagrams have overcome difficulties to make correct source codes 8 cases out of 13. Teachers can presume supervised contents 21 out of 23 cases, which implies high possibilities to mine faults in teaching methods.