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Fostering Students-Driven Learning of Computer Programming with an Ensemble of E-Learning Tools

  • Ricardo QueirósEmail author
  • José Paulo Leal
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing book series (AISC, volume 746)

Abstract

Learning through practice is crucial to acquire a complex skill. Nevertheless, learning is only effective if students have at their disposal a wide range of exercises that cover all the course syllabus and if their solutions are promptly evaluated and given the appropriate feedback. Currently the teaching-learning process in complex domains, such as computer programming, is characterized by an extensive curricula and a high enrolment of students. This poses a great workload for faculty and teaching assistants responsible for the creation, delivering and assessment of student exercises. In order to address these issues, we created an e-learning framework - called Ensemble - as a conceptual tool to organize and facilitate technical interoperability among systems and services in domains that use complex evaluation. These domains need a diversity of tools, from the environments where exercises are solved, to automatic evaluators providing feedback on the attempts of students, not forgetting the authoring, management and sequencing of exercises. This paper presents and analyzes the use of Ensemble for managing the teaching-learning process in an introductory programming course at ESEIG - a school of the Polytechnic of Porto. An experiment was conducted to validate a set of hypotheses regarding the expected gains: increase in number of solved exercises, increase class attendance, improve final grades. They support the conclusion that the use of this e-learning framework for the practice-based learning has a positive impact on the acquisition of complex skills, such as computer programming.

Keywords

E-learning interoperability Distributed and interactive learning environments Programming and programming languages Teaching/learning strategies 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This work is partially funded by the ERDF through the COMPETE 2020 Programme within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961, and by National Funds through the FCT as part of project UID/EEA/50014/2013.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Informatics, CRACS & INESC-Porto LAPolytechnic of PortoPortoPortugal
  2. 2.Faculty of Sciences, CRACS & INESC-Porto LAUniversity of PortoPortoPortugal

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