Reference Guide for Teaching Programming with Comics

Abstract

Comics is emerging as a popular, promising medium for teaching programming. Recent research on coding strip, a form of comic strip that has a direct correspondence to its corresponding code, led to a novel visual programming environment that generates comics from code and an experience report demonstrating various ways coding strips can be used to benefit students' learning and their experiences. However, how teachers can leverage these findings and tools has not yet been documented in a concise, accessible format to facilitate their adoption. To fill this gap, we developed a quick reference guide to summarize comic-based pedagogical techniques and tools teachers can use to augment their teaching. To develop this guide, we analyzed 26 coding strips, 30 design patterns, and their use cases. Based on this analysis, we delineated how comics can facilitate the teaching of programming concepts, languages, and procedures. To evaluate our reference guide, we presented it to seven high school CS teachers at an annual conference for computer studies educators and asked them to rate its readability, usefulness, organization, and their interest in using it for their teaching. Our analysis suggests this reference guide is easy to read/understand, useful, well-structured, and interests teachers to further explore how they can incorporate comics into their teaching.