Paper Info
Title
Leveraging Visual Programming Language and Collaborative Learning to Broaden Participation in Computer Science.
Abstract
Engaging underrepresented populations of women and minorities in Computer Science (CS) represents our greatest untapped resource for increasing the STEM workforce. In recent years, tremendous efforts have been geared towards developing learning materials to increase the interest of underrepresented students in CS. More recently, CS education researchers are beginning to recognize the need to apply the learning sciences to develop age- and grade-appropriate curricula and pedagogies for developing computing competencies among children. One effective approach to build learning competencies among young underrepresented students is through Collaborative Learning, which is an educational approach that involves groups of learners working together to solve a problem or create a product. Our goal, in this paper, is to report our experiences on designing and delivering a curriculum that teaches programming to middle school students using App Inventor through collaborative learning. Our curriculum is developed on the hypothesis that visual programming environment, in this case, App Inventor, present an alternative way of learning programming, which in the collaborative learning environment can enhance programming competencies and interests in underrepresented students. In this experience report, we will describe how we implemented this curriculum as a block course; present our lessons learned, and few findings from the evaluation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3241815.3242586
SIGITE
Keywords
Field
DocType
visual programming language,AppInventor,collaborative learning,programming fundamentals
Competence (human resources),Learning sciences,Collaborative learning,Workforce,Computer science,Knowledge management,Learning programming,Visual programming language,Curriculum,Mathematics education
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5954-2
0
0.34
References 
Authors
12
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Farzana Rahman117023.31