An interactive programming environment for enhancing learning performance

Abstract

Constructivist and social learning environments have attracted considerable research effort in recent years. However, our experience in teaching programming languages has shown that it is an unavoidable difficulty for a programming environment to have a method that enables the system to determine how students think and plan to program. Students often feel perceiving programming subjects as requiring significantly more work than other general courses. Although, novice programmers have their own mental plan to programming, technically they do not have a systematic plan to write a program. In this paper, we investigated novice programmers’ learning performance during programming in a VLB1 programming environment. The system we designed enables students to reach their goal without high cognitive loads and with minimum efforts. The system builds a knowledge tree using a source program written by students and then maintains changes of the source code using a special technique in order to gain students’ learning performance. This also helps the system to minimize error messages of the source code, and increases quality of their explanations.