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Dual Modality Instruction & Programming Environments: Student Usage & Perceptions

Published: 05 March 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Dual-modality blocks-text programming environments have shown promise in helping students learn programming and computational thinking. These environments link blocks-based visualizations to text-based representations, which are more typical of production languages. Since prior work shows that some students who learn in dual-modality environments outperform those who learn in text on assessments, we sought to understand specifically how students use dual-modality environments and what support these environments provide to the learning process. We analyzed survey responses and tool logs collected during a study at a large public university in a CS1 course (N=425). We found that students from all prior programming experience backgrounds made use of the ability to visualize code structures by using blocks. Students with prior experience in blocks or no prior experience said they felt the dual-modality instruction helped them understand code structure and meaning. As students progressed through the class, we found that they made more use of the blocks mode's reference palettes than to its drag-and-drop facilities or mode-switching features. By identifying how students interact with dual-modality tools and how they impact student understanding, this work provides guidance for classroom instructors.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Beyond Blocks: Lilypad, a Text-Based Visual Code Editor2023 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL-HCC57772.2023.00037(226-228)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
  • (2022)Transitioning from Blocks to TextProceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 210.1145/3478432.3499033(1045-1046)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2022

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '21: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
March 2021
1454 pages
ISBN:9781450380621
DOI:10.1145/3408877
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 the author(s) 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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Published: 05 March 2021

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Author Tags

  1. CS1
  2. blocks-based programming environments
  3. computer science education
  4. dual-modality programming environments
  5. novice programmers
  6. programming languages

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View all
  • (2023)Beyond Blocks: Lilypad, a Text-Based Visual Code Editor2023 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL-HCC57772.2023.00037(226-228)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
  • (2022)Transitioning from Blocks to TextProceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 210.1145/3478432.3499033(1045-1046)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2022

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