Mobile Scaffolding Application to Support Novice Learners of Computer Programming

Mbogo, Chao and Blake, Edwin and Suleman, Hussein (2013) Mobile Scaffolding Application to Support Novice Learners of Computer Programming, Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies and Development, December 2013, Cape Town, 84-87.

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Abstract

Support for novice learners of computer programming can be provided by scaffolding the construction of programs. The ubiquity of mobile phones allows us to support learners whenever they wish to work on a program outside the classroom. This paper describes the development of an application that scaffolds the construction of programs on a mobile phone. The application was designed based on a five-level scaffolding framework and implemented on the Android platform.The application scaffolds the construction of programs on a mobile device by: (i) representing a program in parts; (ii) restricting a learner to complete the program in a certain order; (iii) enabling construction of a program one part at a time; (iv) providing instructions, steps, default code to be edited, hints, and error prompts where appropriate; and (v) fading the scaffolds as the learner progresses from one successfully completed and compiled program, to the next.Experiments are currently ongoing to test and evaluate the mobile application.

Item Type: Conference paper
Subjects: Social and professional topics > Professional topics > Computing education
Alternate Locations: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2517941
Date Deposited: 06 Feb 2014
Last Modified: 10 Oct 2019 15:33
URI: http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/921

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