Ville Isomöttönen

The Value of a Real Customer in a Capstone Project

We argue for the importance of a real customer in a capstone project course via reporting experiences from over ten years period at University of Jyvaskyla (JYU), and providing also practical knowledge and theoretical underpinnings for such an arrangement. Based on our experience and empirical data, we underline that this arrangement is a chance for the students to increase their occupational identity. Theoretically our rationalization of the course arrangement proposes self-direction, empowerment, motivation, and deep level learning strategies for the students.

Making teaching of programming learning-oriented and learner-directed

Programming education has been traditionally realized in the form of lecturing, but other approaches are under discussion. These emphasize active participation on the part of students, and, as a research activity, consider pedagogic questions holistically. We join this discussion by stating a course design in which we promote a learning-oriented study culture where learning should not be characterized principally as the task of meeting some predefined completion requirements. Moreover, we want our course to be learner-directed meaning that students should take control over their own learning process. Grounded on these goals, this discussion paper gives us a starting point for a subsequent action research undertaking.

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.

ComTest: a tool to impart TDD and unit testing to introductory level programming

Research has noticed that imparting TDD-like testing to an early computing curriculum is challenging because it increases technical and cognitive load for the students. This paper addresses the challenge with a software-based solution constructed to facilitate the process of writing tests. The solution allows using a compact while efficient syntax for formulating tests, writing tests into JavaDoc comments, thus close to the source code that implements intended functionalities, and automates the generation of actual test code. The constructed solution -- the ComTest tool -- has now been used in four introductory level programming course offerings. The paper presents the tool and concludes with initial lessons learned.

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.

How Do Computer Science Students Use Distributed Version Control Systems

The inclusion of version control systems into computing curricula enables educators to promote competences needed in real-life situations. The use of a version control system also has several potential benefits for the teacher. The teacher might, for instance, use the tool to monitor students’ progress and to give feedback efficiently. This study analyzes how students used the distributed version control system Git in several computing courses. We analyzed students’ commit log data in two advanced programming courses, a second-year introductory software engineering course, and two courses where students developed software products. This enables us to compare Git usage between introductory level and master’s level students, and between exercise-driven and product-driven courses. We found out that students which are using the version control system in a software product development setting used it in a more graceful manner. The students which were further given introduction to branching in the system also used this to not have to wait until the practical session to commit their changes. We also found the amount of garbage in the repositories is strongly relayed to the students’ awareness of the version control process and the need of keeping the workspace clean.

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.

Flipping and Blending—An Action Research Project on Improving a Functional Programming Course

This article reports on an action research project on improving a functional programming course by moving toward a practical and flexible study environment—flipped and blended classroom. Teaching the topic of functional programming was found to be troublesome using a traditional lectured course format. The need to increase students’ amount of practice emerged while subsequent challenges relating to students’ independent practical coursework were observed. Particular concerns relating to group work, learning materials, and the attribute of flexibility were investigated during the third action research cycle. The research cycle was analyzed using a qualitative survey on students’ views, teacher narrative, and students’ study activity data. By this third research cycle, we found that (i) the “call for explanation” is an apt conceptualization for supporting independent work, and in particular for the design of learning materials; (ii) use of student-selected groups that can be flexibly resized or even disbanded enables spontaneous peer support and can avoid frustration about group work; and (iii) students greatly appreciate the high degree of flexibility in the course arrangements but find that it causes them to slip from their goals. The project has improved our understanding of a successful implementation of the target course based on group work and learning materials in the context of independent study, while the attribute of flexibility revealed a contradiction that indicates the need for further action.

Making group processes explicit to student: a case of justice

This article considers student learning about group work in the context of project courses where student groups work under realistic expectations. Based on the literature, justice is explicated as a group work concept and regarded as a professional skill that can be practiced. Preliminary student feedback on teaching through continuous discussions on justice are presented together with teacher experiences.

Challenges and Confusions in Learning Version Control with Git

Scholars agree on the importance of incorporating use of version control systems (VCSs) into computing curricula, so as to be able to prepare students for today’s distributed and collaborative work places. One of the present-day distributed version control systems (DVCSs) is Git, the system we have used on several courses. In this paper, we report on the challenges for learning and using the system based on a survey data collected from a project-based course and our own teaching experiences during several different kinds of computing courses. The results of this analysis are discussed and recommendations are made.