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COOL Programming: Improving Introductory Programming Education through Cooperative Open Learning

Published: 23 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

COOL -- Cooperative Open Learning -- is part of a teaching approach that uses brain-supporting teaching methods and materials to reduce drop-out rates and improve the learning outcomes of introductory programming courses. Cooperative learning, one crucial principle of the concept, takes several forms, such as peer tutoring, pair programming, and talent exchange. In this paper, we describe the COOL Programming approach, its neurodidactical background, and the qualitative and quantitative results gained so far at our university. Starting in programming courses in our Business Informatics bachelor program, we have observed after two terms improvements compared to previous years and to reference groups, with improved learning outcomes (exam results) and reduced dropout rates.

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  • (2022)Exploring diversity in introductory programming classesProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training10.1145/3510456.3514155(102-112)Online publication date: 21-May-2022

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEIT 2020: Proceedings of the 2020 9th International Conference on Educational and Information Technology
February 2020
268 pages
ISBN:9781450375085
DOI:10.1145/3383923
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • University of Thessaly: University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 23 April 2020

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Author Tags

  1. CS1
  2. brain-based learning
  3. cooperative learning
  4. peer teaching
  5. programming course

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  • (2022)Exploring diversity in introductory programming classesProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training10.1145/3510456.3514155(102-112)Online publication date: 21-May-2022

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