Promoting programming education of novice programmers in elementary schools: A contrasting cases approach for learning programming

Exploring relationships among students' computational thinking skills, emotions, and cognitive load using simulation games in primary education

“…To answer RQ2 , this study's findings are in line with a growing body of literature (e.g., Cho et al, 2022; Ma et al, 2023) declared that there is an impact of a positive feeling on students' participation and cognitive load, as a higher level of positive emotions with learning content can lead to their higher achievements and performance. It is of great importance to mention that the “mental loads” between the EG and CG were not significantly different.…”

“…Additionally, Dr. Scratch as an assessment tool similarly showed that students learned purposefully to a “think before starting” to code process with Scratch4SL, which in turn scaled up their CT and programming development by decreasing their cognitive overload as well (Kutay & Oner, 2022; Witherspoon et al, 2017). The subdivision of problem‐solving tasks into OpenSimulator reduced participants' mental load, whereas those who used Scratch needed to dedicate more mental effort to learn how to think and apply their solution plans (Ma et al, 2023). Another significant finding is the negative correlation between happiness and learning gain in Scratch, which means that maybe CG felt bored and depressed during the teaching intervention.…”

“…Review of the relevant literature has shown that most positive effects to eliminate students' cognitive load in programming courses using interactive and multimedia environments can be summarised as follows: (a) the highest cognitive load level was recorded in the sequences concept and the lowest perceived cognitive load was observed in the loop concept using visual code blocks using Scratch (Çakiroğlu et al, 2018), (b) the decrease of extraneous and intrinsic cognitive load are factors influencing significantly students' interaction and collaboration to produce better learning outcomes due to instructional videos, adaptive challenges, and immediate learning aids in digital games (Liao et al, 2019), (c) the lowest students' cognitive load and mental effort was achieved by using interactive elements in digital game‐based contexts with the basic notions of human visual perception in the design of the visualisation to improve the efficiency of visual searches as well (Cho et al, 2022), (d) different levels of interaction amongst visual elements in various problem‐solving contexts can improve different solutions of students to reveal the necessary interactions as important factors influencing the intrinsic cognitive load in terms of semantic knowledge (Çakiroğlu & Bilgi, 2022), and (e) contrasting cases using instances with different elements and concepts of interaction can become more effective for improving students' learning outcomes, especially for novices compared with the single cases approach in learning to programme and mitigate their extraneous cognitive load (Ma et al, 2023).…”

“…Previous studies tend to investigate the causes of cognitive load, focusing strictly on the use of programming knowledge types (syntactic, semantic, and strategic) and use of fundamental constructs, providing evidence regarding: (a) the exploration of how to eliminate intrinsic cognitive load and the effects of element interactivity to understand difficult programming tasks (Çakiroğlu et al, 2018), (b) the measurement of interactive videos and digital game teaching aids to impact students' achievements, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive load, as indicate the variety of behaviour patterns integration in game elements (Liao et al, 2019), (c) the impact of a virtual environment on students' learning effectiveness, cognitive load in collaborative contexts to share solutions, and manipulate their virtual avatars to provide peer guidance and achievements in game‐based contexts (Cho et al, 2022), (d) the determination of what causes cognitive load in programming using interactive environments and its impact on students' problem‐solving plans to propose different solutions in various programming tasks (Çakiroğlu & Bilgi, 2022), and (e) the association between students' previous knowledge and substantial cognitive load (Ma et al, 2023). Understanding the impact of game elements and interaction for younger individuals on learning how to think and practice “computationally” for solving problems can become useful to computers science instructors and educators in terms of identifying the perceived cognitive load gathered from their behaviours and emotions (Berssanette & de Francisco, 2021; Ma et al, 2023; Xu et al, 2022).…”

“…In other words, there are widespread concerns over the lack of students' CT and programming skills development for solving real‐world problems in a simulated reality, when it comes to the effects of interactive environments, considering their emotions and cognitive load in programming courses as well (Israel‐Fishelson & Hershkovitz, 2022). Aside from cognitive load to measure the perceived students' mental effort taken to process information related to reasoning and decision‐making that is mitigated with multimedia materials, for CT and programming skills development, it is noteworthy to reduce it (Lai & Wong, 2022; Ma et al, 2023). Interactive environments can support students of different socio‐cognitive background since there exist from novices who may inhibit learning persistence to more advanced people who interfere with the retrieval and application of their available knowledge structures (Berssanette & de Francisco, 2021).…”