=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1450/paper6
|storemode=property
|title=Designing Creative Programing Experiences for 15 Years Old Students
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1450/paper6.pdf
|volume=Vol-1450
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/iwec/Papavlasopoulou15
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==Designing Creative Programing Experiences for 15 Years Old Students==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1450/paper6.pdf
Designing Creative Programing Experiences for 15 Years
Old Students
Sofia Papavlasopoulou, Michail N. Giannakos and Letizia Jaccheri
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
michailg@idi.ntnu.no
Abstract. It is well known in the computer science education community that is
important to encourage students to acquire programming skills and become cre-
ators and not only mere consumers. Different students have different needs and
learning styles when introduced to programming and making activities, however
it is challenging to accommodate all these needs while you design a workshop
activity. In our approach we have designed and implemented a workshop pro-
gram of 23 students’ total, with the final goal of exploring and improving the
design of appropriate workshops using the current learning environments. This
paper presents an initial exploratory evaluation of a workshop program and the
development of a set of guidelines for improving student experience. A set of
best practices was developed through a focus group with experts using the tech-
nique of affinity diagrams. The results should be useful for designers and re-
searchers who work with design and evaluation of programming workshop pro-
grams.
Keywords: Workshop program; design principles; creativity; programming; K-
12 student
1 INTRODUCTION
Currently, several efforts to broaden participation in programming and introduce com-
putational literacy to young students [1] [6] are in progress. Children interact with vis-
ual programming tools like Scratch [8] to learn how to code by creating interactive
stories, games, animations, and simulations. Sesame workshop [9] has given new in-
sights into how programming for children needs to be approached; in order to be both
educational and entertaining. The process for achieving this mix relies on a develop-
ment model that integrates expertise in media production, educational content (or cur-
riculum), and research with children. Sesame Workshop philosophy [9] identify some
of the challenges and solutions in designing interactive educational activities that can
be used by children. Buechley et al. [1] argue that there is a need to make children
programming a far more informal, approachable, and natural activity.
Although, programming activities for K-12 students have drawn great interest in the
last years, little information is available on how to introduce computing literacy to pre-
university students. Teachers and curriculum designers need to be aware and pay par-
ticular attention to any challenge students experience.
Copyright © 2015 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
Make2Learn 2015 workshop at ICEC’15, September 29, 2015, Trondheim, Norway.
37
In this paper, we present our experience from a programming workshop focusing on
K-12 students. With the knowledge extracted from this experience we aim to explore
how any potential principles and recommendations can contribute to improve current
practices and workshops. This paper focuses on our efforts to develop a programming
workshop that will allow K-12 students to explore their potential interest in computer
science education. Hence, we provide some first insights on: Principles for facilitating
programming workshops for K-12 students.
To do so, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a programming workshop pro-
gram. For the basic evaluation we employed response cards, where students write their
feedback. After the workshop, we organized a focus group with two computing educa-
tion researchers in order to organize the collected data.
2 MATERIALS AND METHODS
2.1 Workshop
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology offers six science programs for
primary and secondary school students with the objective of introducing them and rais-
ing their interest to various science disciplines from physics, chemistry, mathematics,
biology, energy, to computer science. The program, dedicated to computer science ed-
ucation is based on the hypothesis that the interactions between the young students and
artifacts in a creative activity are vital. In this program (see figure 1) students introduced
to programming by playfully interacting with digital artifacts that also exhibit physical
and aesthetical characteristics. Such artifacts allow students to learn by iteratively test-
ing and rebuilding their designs [3].
Fig. 1. Picture from one workshop: children play, program, interact with the assistants.
38
Programming concepts are introduced as needed for the progress of the development
of the artifact. For example, we did not introduce and explain all possible loop con-
structs, but rather introduce each one when and if it is needed. Students experienced
problems, but the problems did not frustrate students since the needed concepts have
been introduced to them. The activity designed to be and finally flowed as an artifact
development project. Each of the sessions was based upon a specific concept such as
movement, sound and visual effect of the artifact. For each session, a set of tasks is
presented to the students: make the artifact to move its hand, connect sensors input with
character movements etc. By constructing programs to implement the tasks one after
another, students ended up with constructing/participating in an "artifact development",
while being taught different programming concepts. The workshop program was based
on Scratch programming environment as well as different hardware like Arduino, sen-
sors, motors etc.
2.2 Extracting Principles via Focus Group and Affinity Diagram Analysis
The main objective of our study is to perform an exploratory investigation of the pro-
gramming workshop and justify the different principles, which are vital for students’
experience. The first step of our methodology was to collect students’ feedback. Hence,
by the end of the workshop we asked students to fill a response card with specific ac-
tivities and attributes helped them learn best, and additional over-all comments/recom-
mendations related to the 2-day workshop program (see figure 2).
Fig. 2. Example of student’s response card.
After cards collection a text analysis was performed and identified 73 comments/rec-
ommendations. Afterwards all the recommendations were translated into English, re-
printed on to post-it notes and stuck onto the wall. Then, a focus group session was
organized in order to analyze the gathered data. The purpose of the focus group, was to
short all the comments/recommendations and form different principles. The focus
group was consisting of two participants working in the area of computing education
39
research, not involved with the workshop; the objective was to organize all the collected
data within an affinity diagram. The affinity diagram technique organizes the loads of
data (students’ recommendations in our case) to greater detail and often leads to results
based on a consensus among participants [7]. This technique is appropriate to organize
large amounts of qualitative data in groups according to the relationships among the
ideas or topics. Affinity diagram technique includes tree main steps:
(1) Create notes for each idea
(2) Identify related ideas
(3) Categorize all notes in groups
As aforementioned all the post-it notes stuck onto the wall. Then, both participants
review, group and reposition them within the different categories and tried to construct
sub-categories, if possible. This was an iterative process that consisted of adding or
removing post-its until a pattern was discovered. Finally, the participants made head-
ings for the constructed categories and subcategories (see figure 3).
Fig. 3. The finalized affinity diagram: Overall recommendations categorization.
3 RESULTS
The affinity diagram consisted of the 73 recommendations and sorts them in five
categories (figure 3): a) gamefulness, b) guidance, c) programming experience, d) pro-
grammable hardware platforms and e) technical problems. Initially, each category was
consisted of 5-31 items. Then, the focus group indicated that within each of two general
categories (gamefulness and programming experience) could correspond three subcat-
egories. Also, six best practices were removed because were considered as irrelevant.
The five general categories and their subcategories are described below.
Gamefulness: The “Gamefulness” category was defined as the use of game ele-
ments during the workshop with an aim to increase engagement and motivation. This
40
category includes three sub-categories (fun, motivation and creative expression) that
clarify the different aspects of children’s attitude to coding. “Fun” includes all prac-
tices/ ideas that describe the workshop as joyful experience. The “Motivation” sub-
category was defined by the focus group as all the recommendations showing that cod-
ing was an interesting experience for students and most of them would like to partici-
pate in another workshop. Third sub-category, “creative expression” consists of prac-
tices/ideas that allow students’ to express their creativity on coding, like making games
controlling the artifacts.
Overall, almost all students agreed with the idea that they had fun during the work-
shop program. Programming workshops should aim to provide a pleasant atmosphere,
giving the impression that programming is an enjoyable experience. Student’s intention
to participate again in other creative programming workshop increases when they feel
happy during the workshop [4]. The attractive appearance of the digital artifacts with
physical and aesthetical characteristics can be important for student’s interest in pro-
gramming. For example, artifacts should look like a character that students are familiar
with and could support relevant play activities that student’s can explore.
Guidance: In this category, all recommendations related to the importance of help
and assistance during the workshop were sorted. As mentioned, each loop construct
was explained only when and if it was needed. Some of the students seemed to be more
familiar with the programming environment and other had more limited understanding.
Students expressed their appreciation for the guidance and help on how to apply the
different programming concepts in order to interact with the artifacts.
Some of the most important aspects of this category were collaboration and commu-
nication among the students. Also, peer support and guidance allowed students to be-
come confident with programming. In summary, proper and sufficient guidance was
very beneficial to help students to construct the appropriate competences during the
workshop [2]. As aforementioned, programming workshops should provide a happy
environment and students should feel free to ask and collaborate for a better “artifact
development”.
Programming Experience: In order to describe the general category of “program-
ming experience” the focus group created two sub-categories. The first sub-category is
“learn”, which contains the recommendations related to the learning procedure of the
workshop. For example, some of the comments mentioned “I learn about coding” indi-
cating that the workshop achieved its goal. Also, recommendations that showed satis-
faction from coding were sorted in the second sub-category “satisfaction”. Many stu-
dents liked very much constructing programs and execute the tasks successfully. Their
satisfaction derived from the fact that they were able to complete the asked tasks, and
construct the needed artifact.
It is also important to stress the benefits of students’ satisfaction. The instructors
noticed that satisfaction leaded students to minimize their frustration and follow the
needed tasks. Therefore, it is crucial for the design of the workshop to adapt to different
students’ needs like age and previous knowledge.
41
Programmable hardware platforms: This category includes the recommendations
related to the interaction with the physical components. Students have the freedom to
explore how artifacts could move, communicate with the environment, make sounds,
etc. The workshop is based on a visual programming environment to construct these
affordances. The programming environment (Scratch for Arduino) requires that a phys-
ical artifact is the beneficiary of the developed software. Students felt more positively
interacting with the artifacts, understand the functionalities and explore how they work.
They had the opportunity to see in practice how different programming concepts are
applied.
Students participated in an “artifact development” using computing tools and tech-
niques for creative expression. Interaction with the artifacts requires flexible hardware
and software tools. These tools could be implemented to specific disciplines from phys-
ics, chemistry and mathematics to poetry, history and human anatomy [7]. Educators
should connect computational artifacts development with other disciplines. The variety
of different disciplines ensures that students’ interest will be raised, by connecting pro-
gramming with other well-known to the students’ notions like scientific phenomena in
physics and chemistry.
Technical problems: In this category the focus group sorted all recommendations
that describe problems with the software or the artefact. For example when the com-
puter crashed, or took a lot of time to perform a task; another example is wrong con-
nections with the boards, functional sensors etc.
This category stresses the importance of a robust software and hardware environ-
ment to ensure an uninterrupted progress as well as to support students’ creativity and
imagination.
4 CONCLUSIONS AND THE WAY AHEAD
In this paper we presented the results from an investigation of a programming workshop
for K-12 students. Our results provide an initial attempt to exploit knowledge from K-
12 students and model this knowledge into useful principles for educators and curricu-
lum designers who aim to develop K-12 programming workshops. The study described
in this paper has led to a set of guidelines for improving and better designing program-
ming workshops. The guidelines were backed by students’ experience and have been
exposed to several stages of validation and organization (focus group, affinity diagram
analysis), which should provide some assurance of their validity. Based on this, five
have been extracted.
The main principle for facilitating programming workshops for K-12 students is to
provide a pleasant atmosphere. Students’ interest rises when they have the feeling that
they can playfully interact and explore the functions of the digital artifacts. Educators
and curriculum designers should offer practical applications in order to empower stu-
dents’ interest to programming. They should aim to improve the overall learning pro-
cedure of the workshops by reforming the digital artifacts, giving the proper guidance
42
and define the specific goals. This will offer perseverance and reinforce students’ pas-
sion to deal with challenges, failures, adversity and success with computer science.
We want to emphasize that our findings are preliminary with inevitable limitations.
Our future research will concentrate on further refinement of the proposed principles
by applying and evaluating them on real conditions. Furthermore, educators, practition-
ers and researchers in the areas of computer science education should evaluate the pro-
posed principles in order to ensure their understanding and seek suggestions and exten-
sions.
Acknowledgements. We would like to thank all the participants of the study. We
also thank Finn Inderhaug Holme, Irene Dominguez Marquez and Ilse Gerda Visser for
setting up and running the workshop, P. Bøyesen and A. Eriksen I. for their contribution
in the early phases of this project, Eirik Høydalsvik for assisting us with the translation
of the cards and the colleagues at the department who work for making Kodeløypa
possible.
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