Developing a Novel Pair Programming Scheme for Improving Coding Skills and Learning Block Instructions of an Educational Programming Language : Entry

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

One of popular approaches to coding at primary and secondary levels is recently based on an educational programming language like Scratch or Entry consisting of block instructions. It is possible for learners to not only understand easily the language but also improve coding abilities in the aspects of computational thinking and creativity, compared with general-purpose programming languages. However, there has been little research on how to learn or teach the coding, even if the coding education of using an educational programming language is just growing up. In particular, there have little cases of applying a pair programming scheme to an educational programming language education, which has been widely used in the existing programming education or software development process. An educational programming language, which has the set of block instructions, is simple in the viewpoint of syntax and possible to write a code within a short time. Therefore, it is easy to apply an instant pair programming scheme due to less tricky work for the cooperation between a pair of programmers, compared with a general-purpose programming language. In this paper, we focus on reflecting the characteristics of an educational programming language and having the advantages of pair programming. We propose how to apply an effective pair programming scheme to coding education. To learn block instructions of Entry educational programming language as well as improve coding abilities, we design a novel pair programming scheme that provides collaborative and competitive mode between a pair of programmers focusing on the secondary school students. We seek to learn all block instructions with minimized pair programming steps as far as possible. We expect that our approach will contribute to reducing coding difficulty and learning coding skills from each other through collaboration between coding learners.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Abstract
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theoretical Background
• 3. A Pair Programming Scheme with Two Modes
• 4. Design
• 5. Implementation
• 6. Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• References