TY - GEN
T1 - A controlled experiment comparing plugged first and unplugged first programming lessons
AU - Hermans, Felienne
AU - Aivaloglou, Ehimia
PY - 2017/11/8
Y1 - 2017/11/8
N2 - Programming education is in fashion: there are many methods, tools, books and apps to teach children programming. is gives rise to the question of how to teach programming. Do we teach the concepts with or without the use of a computer, also called plugged and unplugged respectively? is paper aims to measure what method is more eective to start with: plugged or unplugged rst. Specically, we are interested in examining which method is beer in terms of (1) facilitating understanding of programming concepts, (2) motivating and supporting the students’ sense of self-ecacy in programming tasks, and (3) motivating the students to explore and use programming constructs in their assignments. To this end we conduct a controlled study with 35 elementary school children, in which half of the children receive four plugged lessons and the other half receives four unplugged lessons. Aer this, both groups receive four weeks of Scratch lessons. e results show that aer eight weeks there was no dierence between the two groups in their mastering of programming concepts. However, the group that started with unplugged lessons was more condent of their ability to understand the concepts, i.e. demonstrated beer self-ecacy beliefs. Furthermore, the children in the unplugged rst group used a wider selection of Scratch blocks.
AB - Programming education is in fashion: there are many methods, tools, books and apps to teach children programming. is gives rise to the question of how to teach programming. Do we teach the concepts with or without the use of a computer, also called plugged and unplugged respectively? is paper aims to measure what method is more eective to start with: plugged or unplugged rst. Specically, we are interested in examining which method is beer in terms of (1) facilitating understanding of programming concepts, (2) motivating and supporting the students’ sense of self-ecacy in programming tasks, and (3) motivating the students to explore and use programming constructs in their assignments. To this end we conduct a controlled study with 35 elementary school children, in which half of the children receive four plugged lessons and the other half receives four unplugged lessons. Aer this, both groups receive four weeks of Scratch lessons. e results show that aer eight weeks there was no dierence between the two groups in their mastering of programming concepts. However, the group that started with unplugged lessons was more condent of their ability to understand the concepts, i.e. demonstrated beer self-ecacy beliefs. Furthermore, the children in the unplugged rst group used a wider selection of Scratch blocks.
KW - Programming education
KW - Scratch
KW - Unplugged
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85053075511&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85053075511&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3137065.3137072
DO - 10.1145/3137065.3137072
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85053075511
SN - 9781450354288
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
SP - 49
EP - 56
BT - WiPSCE 2017 - Proceedings of the 12th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education
A2 - Hubwieser, Peter
A2 - Barendsen, Erik
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 12th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education, WiPSCE 2017
Y2 - 8 November 2017 through 10 November 2017
ER -