Stefano Federici

A minimal, extensible, drag-and-drop implementation of the C programming language

Block languages are visual programming languages based on the metaphor of programming bricks. Block languages such as Scratch, StarLogo and Alice, are becoming fundamental tools to get children interested in computer programming. These environments and environments derived from them, such as BYOB, have all the features needed to be strong candidates for introductory computer science courses and are starting to be used in some introductory university courses. Nonetheless, some computer science educators at college and university level feel that block languages are too toy-like to be used in regular computer science curricula. Standard programming languages, such as C or Java, are still thought of as more appropriate. In this work I will describe a third way to programming languages that can be used for introductory computer science: the visual implementations of relevant subsets of standard programming languages such as C. An initial evaluation showing excellent student acceptance is reported in this paper

Who Learns Better - Achieving Long-term Knowledge Retention by Programming-based Learning.

In this paper we describe the experience of a year-long experiment devoted to understanding if retention of knowledge acquired by students while learning a specific subject can be improved by letting them build by themselves interactive models of that knowledge by means of a visual programming language based on the block metaphor. What we propose is along the lines of active learning and learning-by-teaching. Students build an interactive model that tests the knowledge of a specific topic and it is assumed that the topic will be better memorized and understood than using standard learning strategies. To test this hypothesis, we run an experiment on the students of two 5th grade classes, split in three groups. One group learned the topic by both following standard explanations and by creating by themselves multimedia interactive projects by means of a block language. A second group learned by following standard explanations and by playing with multimedia interactive projects created by their peers in the first group. A third group learned by only following standard explanations. The experiment outcome shows that there is a significant improvement in the retention rate after several months for those students that build their digital tools by themselves with respect to both students that use digital tools built by others and students that do not use digital tools at all. It is our opinion that this strategy can be applied to topics of all disciplines, providing the bases of what we can define as programming-based learning, a general learning methodology based on computer

Are Educators Ready for Coding

During the last year, several countries, such as England, Finland and Italy, have decided to focus their new school curricula on computing, coding and IT. However, present teachers do not feel confident about moving to this new paradigm. Furthermore, coding would be relegated to be taught for just a few hours. Luckily, recent new tools have been designed to introduce young students to coding that can be also easily used by teachers to create engaging multimedia supports for their everyday lessons. In this paper, we describe several experiments that show how a new path from teachers to students and then back to teachers can be followed in order to build a new model of digital teaching. The proposed model does not require present teachers to become proficient IT experts.

FacilUeb: When Web Publishing is Only One Click Away

Publication of documents on the web is a non trivial task for non technical people. People that are are not interested in learning the elements of the web and its protocols should be allowed to publish documents on the web in HTML format without having to change their habits or having to learn hot to use new, specialized authoring tools.The FacilUeb Project aimed at studying the behavior of non technical users when confronted with the task of making their documents available on the web, in order to develop a working prototype of the simplest possible interface that will allow them to accomplish this task on both static and dynamic web sites. Final goal of the project was to design a transparent process that would allow non technical users to accomplish this task by using their everyday authoring tools so that they won’t need to acquire any additional specific knowledge.