Grant Recipients
Edith Law, Cheriton School of Computer Science
Sangho Suh, Cheriton School of Computer Science
Description
This project aims to develop a curriculum and guidelines for a new approach of teaching and learning programming with comics. Recent research explored the feasibility of teaching and learning programming with comics. The research discovered that both teachers and students want to incorporate this into their teaching and learning. The theoretical and empirical support for this approach also suggested that it benefits teachers and students in many ways. However, there is currently no curriculum and guidelines on how to use this approach. They are necessary for teachers who want to incorporate this approach into their teaching, as they increase accessibility and ensure effectiveness. This project aims to address this. As a whole, this work extends the popular creative computing curriculum. It advances computing education at UWaterloo and beyond by contributing new ways for teachers and students to teach and learn programming in an engaging and effective manner.
This project follows a previous LITE grant-sponsored research that explored how to promote meaningful learning in computer science courses by leveraging concreteness fading. Concreteness fading is an evidence-based instructional technique that has been used to teach abstract concepts in many disciplines, such as in math and science education. It is a technique that involves two or more stages in which the first stage introduces concrete (e.g., physical) representation of the concept and then more abstract (e.g., symbolic, mathematical expression) representation in subsequent stage(s). Since it connects what learners already know (concrete) to what they are learning (abstract), it has been shown to foster deep learning. However, despite its potential benefits for computing education, the technique had not been explored in the computing education context. Thus the project sought to realize the potential of this technique in real-world classroom settings through the design and evaluation of new tools that implement concreteness fading in computer science contexts.
Three conference papers and two workshop papers have been published and presented at premier conferences. Two other conference papers are currently under review. These works demonstrated that concreteness fading---especially the newly proposed implementation that uses comics in its progression---offers many benefits to students and teachers in computing education contexts. Compared to the previous project, which focused on concreteness fading, the project proposed for this Seed Grant focuses on developing and evaluating a computing curriculum, which requires independent research of its own. That is, different research methods are required to develop and evaluate a curriculum.
Website
Coding Strips - https://codingstrip.github.io/
References
[1] Guzdial, Mark, and Barbara Ericson. Introduction to computing and programming in python. New York, NY: Pearson, 2016.
[2] “Creative coding,” Wikipedia, 18 June 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_coding.
[3] Bayliss, Jessica D., and Sean Strout. "Games as a" flavor" of CS1." In Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, pp. 500-504. 2006.
[4] Beck, Robert E., Jennifer Burg, Jesse M. Heines, and Bill Manaris. "Computing and music: A spectrum of sound." In Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education, pp. 7-8. 2011.
[5] Burke, Quinn, and Yasmin B. Kafai. "Programming & storytelling: opportunities for learning about coding & composition." In Proceedings of the 9th international conference on interaction design and children, pp. 348-351. 2010.
[6] Resnick, Mitchel, John Maloney, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Natalie Rusk, Evelyn Eastmond, Karen Brennan, Amon Millner et al. "Scratch: programming for all." Communications of the ACM 52, no. 11 (2009): 60-67.
[7] “About Scratch,” September 01, 2021, https://scratch.mit.edu/about.
[8] “ScratchEd,” September 15, 2021, https://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/
[9] Brennan, Karen, and Raquel Jimenez. "The Scratch Educator Meetup." Designing Constructionist Futures: The Art, Theory, and Practice of Learning Designs (2020): 85.
[10] “Scratch Ideas,” September 01, 2021, https://scratch.mit.edu/ideas.
[11] Qiu, Kanjun, Leah Buechley, Edward Baafi, and Wendy Dubow. "A curriculum for teaching computer science through computational textiles." In Proceedings of the 12th international conference on interaction design and children, pp. 20-27. 2013.
[12] Greenberg, Ira, Deepak Kumar, and Dianna Xu. "Creative coding and visual portfolios for CS1." In Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education, pp. 247-252. 2012.
[13] Creative Computing Lab, September 10, 2021, https://creativecomputing.gse.harvard.edu/guide/curriculum.html
[14] Anonymized for review.
[15] Wang, Zezhong, Shunming Wang, Matteo Farinella, Dave Murray-Rust, Nathalie Henry Riche, and Benjamin Bach. "Comparing effectiveness and engagement of data comics and infographics." In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-12. 2019.
[16] Bolton-Gary, Cynthia. "Connecting through Comics: Expanding Opportunities for Teaching and Learning." Online Submission (2012).
[17] Yang, Gene. "Why comics belong in the classroom." (2016).
[18] Kelleher, Caitlin, and Randy Pausch. "Using storytelling to motivate programming." Communications of the ACM 50, no. 7 (2007): 58-64.
[19] Guo, Philip J. "Online python tutor: embeddable web-based program visualization for cs education." In Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education, pp. 579-584. 2013.
[20] Anonymized for review.
[21] “Curricula Recommendations,” September 10, 2021, https://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations