Assessing programming education approaches for college beginners with different backgrounds

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we examine the impact of Lego Mindstorms EV3 as a programming learning resource for undergraduate students with different backgrounds. One of the objectives of programming is to improve learners' problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Active class participation is a crucial part of improving programming learning outcomes. This study aims to expose undergraduate students from different disciplines to a series of programming projects and competitions based on Lego go Mindstorms EV3 and examines if these experiences increase their interest in programming. Our analysis results show that these activities can inspire students from various backgrounds to become more interested in programming learning and have a significant impact on quality of programming education.

References

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2. Conway, Matthew, et al. "Alice: lessons learned from building a 3D system for novices." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2000. 3
3. Jenkins, Tony. "The motivation of students of programming." ACM SIGCSE Bulletin. Vol. 33. No. 3. ACM, 2001. 1
4. Lego Mndstorms, https://www.lego.com/en-us/mindstorms {accessed August 2018} 5
5. Powers, Kris, et al. "Tools for teaching introductory programming: what works?" ACM SIGCSE Bulletin. Vol. 38. No. 1. ACM, 2006. 2

Index Terms

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing education

      • Computational thinking