Personalizing CS1 with robots

Summet, Jay; Kumar, Deepak; O’Hara, Keith J.; Walker, D.; Ni, Lijun; Blank, Douglas; Balch, Tucker

doi:10.1145/1508865.1509018

Cited by 41 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(2 reference statements)

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“…The designers and developers of the IPRE robot had an initial goal to address a wider audience and to incorporate elements of creativity to motivate students who do not fit the traditional computer science mold [Balch et al 2008;Kumar et al 2008;Summet et al 2009]. In this research setting, that goal was not met.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The desire to strive for students to bring in creative concepts and storytelling through robots via openended assignments to increase motivation was also a consideration [Balch et al 2008]. Additionally, the design for the robot and its curriculum was also meant to expand preconceived notions of computing [Summet et al 2009]. However, no data are provided in these articles that investigates whether these goals have been achieved.…”

Section: Robots In the Classroommentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Xu et al [2008] provide no formal research methodology and no quantitative or qualitative results in their article, but claim that they found that using robots engaged students at a hands-on level and also found the robot to be tangible, exciting for students to use, and relevant for students based on surveys. Summet et al [2009], claim that early results show success in a CS1 course and that the personal robot is relevant and fun for students. Again, developer bias is not addressed, and there are no formal quantitative or qualitative results provided.…”

Section: Ipre Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous studies have examined the impact of robots in coursework [Adams 2010;Cliburn 2006;Lauwers et al 2009], some of which have focused on the impact of robots in CS0 courses. There has been only a handful of articles on the use of IPRE robots in courses, and only one independent study of its affect on students [Martins et al 2010;Summet et al 2009]. …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Learning to Program with Personal Robots

McGill

2012

ACM Trans. Comput. Educ.

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One of the goals of using robots in introductory programming courses is to increase motivation among learners. There have been several types of robots that have been used extensively in the classroom to teach a variety of computer science concepts. A more recently introduced robot designed to teach programming to novice students is the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE) robot. The author chose to use this robot and study its motivational effects on non-computer science students in a CS0 course. The purpose of this study was to determine whether using the IPRE robots motivates students to learn programming in a CS0 course. After considering various motivational theories and instruments designed to measure motivation, the author used Keller's Instructional Materials Motivation Survey to measure four components of motivation: attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction. Additional items were added to the survey, including a set of open-ended questions. The results of this study indicate that the use of these robots had a positive influence on participants' attitudes towards learning to program in a CS0 course, but little or no effect on relevance, confidence, or satisfaction. Results also indicate that although gender and students interests may affect individual components of motivation, gender, technical self-perception, and interest in software development have no bearing on the overall motivational levels of students. ACM Reference Format:McGill, M. M. 2012. Learning to program with personal robots: Influences on student motivation. ACM Trans.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Robots In the Classroommentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ipre Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Learning to Program with Personal Robots

McGill

2012

ACM Trans. Comput. Educ.

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“…Students learned to program by controlling a small robot using Python [3]. Our evaluation of this effort suggested that robotics was not significantly more motivating or having a greater impact on retention than our traditional course [40]. One explanation for this finding is that students did see the relevance of the context of robotics, but it did not motivate them.…”

Section: Explaining the Retention Effectmentioning

confidence: 79%

Exploring hypotheses about media computation

Guzdial

2013

Proceedings of the Ninth Annual International ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research

143

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Research in computing education has been criticized as "Marco Polo," e.g., the researchers tried something and reported what happened. Our developing field needs more hypothesisdriven and theory-driven research. We will get there by making clear our goals and hypotheses, testing those goals and hypotheses explicitly, and critically reconsidering our results. My colleagues and I designed and evaluated a mediacentric introductory computing approach ("Media Computation") over the last ten years. We started from a "Marco Polo" style and an explicit set of hypotheses. We have worked to test those hypotheses and to understand the outcomes. Our iterative effort has led us to explore deeper theory around motivation and learning. This paper serves as an example of a ten year research program that resulted in more hypotheses, a more elaborated theory, and a better understanding of the potential impacts of a computer science curriculum change. SETTING HYPOTHESESValentine critiqued computer science education research papers in 2004 [45] as having a "Marco Polo" style: "I went there and I saw this." He pointed out that such papers play an important role in communicating experience to fellow educators, but did not have the same value as experimental papers, which conducted some theory-driven analysis of a given treatment. In his meta-analysis, he characterized the majority of papers published in the SIGCSE conference were "Marco Polo" papers. I suggest in this paper that "Marco Polo" is a natural condition at the beginning of a research project. Explicit statement of hypotheses, testing against those hypotheses, and iterating to refine and integrate other results and theories creates a progression to producing theory.Since 2002, my students and I have been designing and evaluating an approach to teaching introductory computation with a media-focused context, named Media Computation (or MediaComp). MediaComp introduces computing through exploration of data abstraction related to digital media. Students manipulate pixels to create Photoshop-like image effects, samples to splice or reverse sounds, text to compose or search HTML pages, and frames in a video. At Georgia Tech, MediaComp is taught using Python, but at other institutions (such as UCSD [37]) they teach similar things in Java. Our first paper which proposed the approach was even less of a research contribution than a "Marco Polo" paper, since we merely considered the possibility of a mediacentric approach [25]. The first two papers describing the initial implementation were clearly "Marco Polo" style papers [26,17] describing what we were trying and some of the initial responses from the students.In addition to the reports of "we went there and saw this," those two published papers (the ITICSE 2003 paper [17] and our first design paper [24]) and an internal design document for the course[16] 1 together lay out a series of design goals. The evaluation efforts that followed were explicitly testing those design goals as hypotheses, where the hypotheses were that the implem...

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Active Blended Learning to Improve Students’ Motivation in Computer Programming Courses: A Case Study

Alhazbi

2015

Advances in Engineering Education in the Middle East and North Africa

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Personalizing CS1 with robots

Cited by 41 publications

References 10 publications

Learning to Program with Personal Robots

Learning to Program with Personal Robots

Exploring hypotheses about media computation

Active Blended Learning to Improve Students’ Motivation in Computer Programming Courses: A Case Study

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