Toshihisa Nishimori

A Documentation Platform for Supporting and Assessing Collaborative Knowledge Building in Learning Computer Programming

This paper presents a documentation approach for promoting students’ knowledge building in learning Computer Programming. The underlying premise is that the documentation process allows students to track their learning, develops transformative communication with teachers, and provides a persistent record of individual work and collective cognition artifacts. Our focus is on practical and collaborative considerations for learning computer programming, and we explore a theoretical instructional design framework that organizes learning activities in order to better engage students in the programming course. A learning platform to support this theoretical framework was developed to give students simultaneous access to a shared online documentation work environment. The students were able to program and do documentation work together in real time, and to invite others to view, check, and comment on their files. The documentation work leading up to the artifact creation showed the students’ improving understanding of programming, especially in their collaborative work. Thus, we show how collaborative documentation work is useful in improving deep constructivism and students’ engagement in knowledge building.