دانلود رایگان مقاله عمل محاسباتی دانش آموزان و عملکرد حل مساله توسط محیط برنامه نویسی بصری

Abstract

This study aims to advocate that a visual programming environment offering graphical items and states of a computational problem could be helpful in supporting programming learning with computational problem-solving. A visual problem-solving environment for programming learning was developed, and 158 college students were conducted in a computational problem-solving activity. The students' activities of designing, composing, and testing solutions were recorded by log data for later analysis. To initially unveil the students' practice and strategies exhibited in the visual problem-solving environment, this study proposed several indicators to quantitatively represent students' computational practice (Sequence, Selection, Simple iteration, Nested iteration, and Testing), computational design (Problem decomposition, Abutment composition, and Nesting composition), and computational performance (Goal attainment and Program size). By the method of cluster analysis, some empirical patterns regarding the students' programming learning with computational problem-solving were identified. Furthermore, comparisons of computational design and computational performance among the different patterns of computational practice were conducted. Considering the relations of students' computational practice to computational design and performance, evidence-based suggestions on the design of supportive programming environments for novice programmers are discussed.

5. Discussion and conclusion

This study proposed a visual problem-solving environment aiming to assist students' programming learning by analyzing, designing, implementing, and evaluating solutions to computational problems. Because many studies have suggested the potential of visual programming environments for programming learning (Cooper et al., 2000; Lye & Koh, 2014; Maloney et al., 2010), the visual problem-solving environment proposed in this study further allowed the students to solve computational problems by iteratively formulating diverse programming strategies in a visualized and constructive way. Thus, the purpose of programming learning changes its emphasis to the understanding of programming constructs and the application of programming strategies rather than merely focusing on the features or syntax of programming languages (Muller & Haberman, 2008; de Raadt et al., 2009). For this reason, this study examined the effectiveness of the proposed environment by exploring the interrelations among students' computational practice, computational design, and computational problem-solving performance in the computational problem-solving activities. This pilot study initially proposed ten indicators categorized as computational practice, computational design, and computational performance to display the features of computational problem-solving activities. For example, the participants in this study exhibited the highest numbers of simple iterations among the use of four control-flow blocks. They also tested the results of program execution according to a chunk of instructions. This may imply that the participants could easily identify the situation of adopting simple iteration control-flow blocks in the visual problem-solving environment. This tendency is in line with the finding that novice programmers are relatively familiar with applying loop concepts in a visual programming environment (Maloney, Peppler, Kafai, Resnick, & Rusk, 2008). The visual programming elements provided by the visual problem-solving environment may further support the decomposition of computational problems, the assembly of control flow structures, and the testing of chunks of novices' self-generated instructions (Maloney et al., 2010).