Improved Mobile Robot Programming Performance through Real-time Program Assessment

Abstract

The strong interest children show for mobile robots makes these devices potentially powerful to teach programming. Moreover, the tangibility of physical objects and the sociability of interacting with them are added benefits. A key skill that novices in programming have to acquire is the ability to mentally trace program execution. However, because of their embodied and real-time nature, robots make the mental tracing of program execution difficult.To address this difficulty, in this paper we propose an automatic program evaluation framework based on a robot simulator. We describe a real-time implementation providing feedback and gamified hints to students.In a user study, we demonstrate that our hint system increases the percentage of students writing correct programs from 50 % to 96 %, and decreases the average time to write a correct program by 30 %. However, we could not show any correlation between the use of the system and the performance of students on a questionnaire testing concept acquisition. This suggests that programming skills and concept understanding are different abilities.Overall, the clear performance gain shows the value of our approach for programming education using robots.

What Teachers Need for Orchestrating Robotic Classrooms

“…3.2), we inferred that teachers' intentions were to make students think about the connection between their robot behaviour and their program on screen. This idea comes back to the key skill of tracing program executions for novice programmers [18]. This skill is even more important when diagnosing errors in robotics activities, in which the challenge for students is to find the source of their mistakes across different interfaces.…”

“…Compared to programming activities, robotic activities pose new challenges to diagnosis. While in programming activities students can check their program line by line, in robotic activities, robots behave in the continuous real world, which makes program execution line by line harder [18]. The other challenge arises from the inherent characteristic of robots having noisy sensors and imperfect motors, thus, making the connection between the expected execution of program and the resulting robot behaviour harder to predict [18].…”

Teachers' perspective on fostering computational thinking through educational robotics

“…Educational robotics has garnered significant interest in recent years to teach students not only the fundamentals of robotics, but also core Computer Science (CS) concepts [5] and Computational Thinking (CT) competencies [2,3]. However, participation in an ER Learning Activity (ERLA) does not automatically ensure student learning [17], with the design of the activity playing a key role towards the learning outcomes [6]. Indeed, the lack of understanding as to how specific instructional approaches impact student learning in ER activities has been raised at multiple occasions [16].…”