Experiences of prospective high school teachers using a programming teaching tool

Abstract

During their time at school few high school students are exposed to basic computing concepts as Computer Science (CS) is not considered to be an important part of the curriculum. As a result many high school students do not encounter programming during their studies. In the UK, despite newly qualified CS and ICT (Information and Communication Technology) teachers having specific subject knowledge, in recent years schools have steadily 'watered down' the content of CS courses and have aligned the subject with disciplines such as Business Studies. This has distanced Computing from the other sciences whilst adding to students' confusion about what the subject actually entails. This paper presents the results of a study which involved 23 trainee CS/ICT teachers. The study took the form of a day-long workshop session and had the objectives of determining what perceptions and opinions the trainee teachers held in regards to programming as well as to discover the effectiveness and potential of a programming teaching tool based on the concept of a robot simulator. Analysis of data collected during the session shows how, despite the majority of trainees having some programming experience, a number of trainees had difficulty completing basic programming challenges. This displays how some CS/ICT teachers may lack fundamental programming knowledge. Moreover, whilst most of the trainees felt programming should be taught to high school students studying a CS or ICT course, fewer than half of the trainees said they had the confidence to teach the subject. An evaluation of the effectiveness of the robot simulator as a teaching tool is also presented as is a discussion on the implications which these findings may have.

Systematic literature review: teaching novices programming using robots

“…In order to contribute to knowledge in this research area, some additional work based on these suggestions has been completed. Described in [20] a study involving 23 trainee High School ICT/Computer Science teachers, which reports on their experiences using a robot simulator to teach Java programming concepts, has been performed. It was found during this study how the implementation of a robot simulator was found to offer an enjoyable and effective method of teaching programming despite only moderately improving the trainee's confidence in their ability to teach programming.…”

The effectiveness of simulated robots for supporting the learning of introductory programming: a multi-case case study

“…Following the SR an early version of the Kebot robot simulator was used during exploratory empirical research to seek an initial insight using such a tool, to gain feedback and to help with the generation of ideas. Details of this work have been disseminated previously (Major et al, 2011). Whilst the research design of the exploratory studies was informal, several important findings were established.…”

Ensino de Programação no Ensino Médio: Uma Abordagem Orientada ao Design com a linguagem Scratch

“…Futschek e Moschitz [8] relata as suas experiências com o uso de estratégias de ensino de programação para crianças, que são baseadas em objetos tangíveis, as quais se mostraram capazes de diminuir a abstração para determinadas explicações e de estabelecer um ambiente motivador. Já Major et al [9] discorre sobre a sua experiência pedagógica através da utilização de uma ferramenta de ensino de programação baseada em um simulador de robôs.…”