Abstract
Programming is a popular subject in education and experts emphasize the importance of teaching programming to the children in the high school or even earlier. In this study, we used robots for teaching programming basics to the high school and college students and observed the effects of different interfaces. We used an educational robot called Thymio-II with Aseba Event Script Language (AESL), which is designed specifically for the Thymio. In this work, our hypothesis is that visual programming interfaces are more successful on learning programming and facilitate the learning with other interfaces and languages. In order to teach programming, as well as the interfaces and the robot features, we created a curriculum applicable to all interfaces. We taught students ages ranging from 15 to 24 using lecture content prepared in the form of video recordings. Students were given 30 min of lectures and at the end of each lecture students were expected to write a program according to predefined requirements. Students were divided to groups using different interfaces and we observed the difference of the learning curves of students for each programming interface. In our tests, we used original English AESL, Turkish version of AESL and a graphical interface called Visual Programming Language (VPL). We compared the performance of the students using the graphical icon based against the classical text based programming languages.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Lectures can be accessed via https://youtu.be/JchvD4sMqBk.
References
Feurzeig, W.: Programming-Languages as a Conceptual Framework for Teaching Mathematics. Final Report on the First Fifteen Months of the LOGO Project (1969)
Clements, D.H., Gullo, D.F.: Effects of computer programming on young children’s cognition. J. Educ. Psychol. 76(6), 1051–1058 (1984)
Pea, R.D., Kurland, D.M.: On the cognitive effects of learning computer programming. New Ideas Psychol. 2(2), 137–168 (1984)
Dalbey, J., Linn, M.C.: The demands and requirements of computer programming: a literature review. J. Educ. Comput. Res. 1(3), 253–274 (1985)
Saeli, M., Perrenet, J., Jochems, W.M.G., Zwnaeveld, B.: Teaching programming in secondary school: a pedagogical content knowledge perspective. Inf. Educ. 10(1), 73–88 (2010)
Winslow, L.E.: Programming pedagogy - a psychological over-view. ACM SIGCSE Bull. 28(3), 17–22 (1996)
Computing our future Computer programming and coding - Priorities, school curricula and initiatives across Europe. http://www.eun.org/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=521cb928-6ec4-4a86-b522-9d8fd5cf60ce&groupId=43887. Accessed 30 Mar 2017
Pears, A., Seidman, S., Malmi, L., Mannila, L., Adams, E., Bennedsen, J., Paterson, J.: A survey of literature on the teaching of introductory programming. ACM SIGCSE Bull. 39(4), 204 (2007)
Duke, R., Salzman, E., Burmeister, J., Poon, J., Murray, L.: Teaching programming to beginners - choosing the language is just the first step. In: ACE 2000, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 79–86 (2000)
Kölling, M., Rosenberg, J.: Blue - a language for teaching object-oriented programming. ACM SIGCSE Bull. 28(1), 190–194 (1996)
Brilliant, S.S., Wiseman, T.R.: The first programming paradigm and language dilemma. ACM SIGCSE Bull. 28(1), 338–342 (1996)
Al-A’Ali, M., Hamid, M.: Design of an arabic programming language (ARABLAN). Comput. Lang. 21(3–4), 191–201 (1995)
Annamalai, M.: Ezhil: a tamil programming language. eprint arXiv:0907.4960 (2009)
Maloney, J., Resnick, M., Rusk, N., Silverman, B., Eastmond, E.: The scratch programming language and environment. ACM Trans. Comput. Educ. 10(4), 1–15 (2010)
Doolittle, P.E., Camp, W.G.: Constructivism: the career and technical education perspective. J. Vocat. Techn. Educ. 16(1) (1999). http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JVTE/v16n1/doolittle.html. Accessed 30 Mar 2017
Bers, M.U., Ponte, I., Juelich, C., Viera, A., Schenker, J.: Teachers as designers: Integrating robotics in early childhood education. Inf. Technol. Child. Educ. Annu. 2002(1), 123–145 (2002)
Riedo, F., Chevalier, M., Magnenat, S., Mondada, F.: Thymio II, a robot that grows wiser with children. In: 2013 IEEE Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts (ARSO) (2013)
Specifications - Thymio & Aseba. https://www.thymio.org/en:thymiospecifications. Accessed 30 Mar 2017
Magnenat, S., Rettornaz, P., Bonani, M., Longchamp, V., Mondada, F.: ASEBA: a modular architecture for event-based control of complex robots. IEEE/ASME Trans. Mechatron. 16(2), 321–329 (2011)
Shin, J., Siegwart, R., Magnenat, S.: Visual programming language for Thymio II robot. In: Interaction Design and Children (IDC) (2014)
Magnenat, S., Longchamp, V., Mondada, F.: Aseba, an event-based middleware for distributed robot control. In: IEEE-RSJ 2007 International Conference on Intelligent Robotsand Systems, Workshops and Tutorials CD (2007)
Overview & Download - Thymio & Aseba. https://www.thymio.org/en:start. Accessed 30 Mar 2017
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank all the people who participate in this study and our team members Ihsan Halici and M. Adem Celebi for their efforts in teaching and test assessments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bağcı, B.B., Kamaşak, M., Ince, G. (2018). The Effect of the Programming Interfaces of Robots in Teaching Computer Languages. In: Lepuschitz, W., Merdan, M., Koppensteiner, G., Balogh, R., Obdržálek, D. (eds) Robotics in Education. RiE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 630. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62875-2_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62875-2_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62874-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62875-2
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)