Encouraging Task Creation Among Programming Teachers in Primary Schools
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Author / Producer
Date
2021
Publication Type
Conference Paper
ETH Bibliography
yes
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Abstract
Programming is being widely adopted as a classroom activity to promote computational literacy across the full spectrum of ages. As of now, however, there is a gap between curriculum designers and the teachers that work directly alongside pupils. Educators build their lessons around predefined curricula and programming environments with limited scope for customization. As a result, their involvement is limited to using teaching resources as black boxes and creating tasks that live external to the programming environment. This work presents a small extension to the XLogoOnline programming environment and demonstrates how non-technical users are empowered to define, share and evaluate their own programming tasks. Our proposed tool is targeted at navigation tasks on a two-dimensional grid. Different categories of tasks can be easily assembled in graphical form and submitted solutions are automatically verified. We report from practical experience over a time span of 18 months and give highlights from a collection of 1331 programming tasks. The tool offers value by allowing teachers to design handouts and exams and also encourages teamwork by allowing pupils to challenge their fellow classmates. Beyond their use in the classroom, the idea of collecting task sets is a useful foundation for self-guided learning, exams and even large-scale competitions – which we intend to pursue in future work.
Permanent link
Publication status
published
External links
Book title
Informatics in Schools. Rethinking Computing Education
Journal / series
Volume
13057
Pages / Article No.
135 - 146
Publisher
Springer
Event
14th International Conference on Informatics in Schools: Situation, Evolution, and Perspectives (ISSEP 2021)
Edition / version
Methods
Software
Geographic location
Date collected
Date created
Subject
Programming education; Turtle graphics; Creating teaching materials; Automatic validation of submissions
Organisational unit
03666 - Hromkovic, Juraj (emeritus) / Hromkovic, Juraj (emeritus)