Resumen de Improving feedback with educational robotsand visual programming environmentsto increase student engagement in programming modules
Felipe I. Anfurrutia, A. Alvarez, Mikel Larrañaga Olagaray
Learning and Teaching programming skills is challenging both for students and teachers (Gomes &Mendes, 2007; Mihci & Ozdener, 2014). In Computer Science degrees, those skills are covered in variousmodules, which usually have high failure and dropout rates.Constructivist approaches, such as Kolb’s Learning Cycle (Kolb, 1984), have resulted in improvementsof the quality of those modules. Providing the students with formative feedback would allowthem to move from the typical trial-and-error process in programming modules to a reflection processon their learning (Edwards, 2004).Several authors propose to incorporate visual programing environments or physical devices to reducethe problems of novice students in introductory programming modules (Wilson & Moffat, 2010).Those devices can also help providing richer feedback to students (Anfurrutia, Álvarez, Larrañaga, &López-Gil, 2018).During the last seven years the authors of this paper have carried out different innovations in modulesrelated to programming of the first year of Computer Science degree (Álvarez & Larrañaga, 2016;Anfurrutia et al., 2018). Those innovations have been oriented to the enrichment of the feedback in orderto promote student engagement. To this end, Kolb’s Learning Cycle has been applied in those moduleswith the support of visual environments and educational robots.During this research, students and teachers have filled-in several surveys. Analyzing the answersto the surveys and the students’ marks, we have detected evidence on the increase of the motivation ofstudents when using those tools. This has also produced improvements in the percentage of studentsthat take the exams and in the obtained grades.This paper presents these positive research findings along with a set of aspects that should be consideredwhen trying to deploy a similar experience in programming modules. Those aspects have beenderived from the experiences carried out during those years.
