Couplets: Helping Elementary School Students Recognize Structure in Code (Abstract Only).
SIGCSE '18: The 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education Baltimore Maryland USA February, 2018(2018)
摘要
We believe teaching elementary school students to reason about programs is as important as teaching them to write programs. To facilitate development of this skill in young children one must choose a developmentally appropriate domain. Microsoft's Kodu Game Lab is a pattern-matching rule-based language whose semantics is significantly different than Scratch or Python. We chose Kodu because one can write non-trivial programs in two to four lines, and analyzing these programs is within the abilities of a typical 8 year old. Reasoning about programs requires students to understand the structure of code. The approach we're advocating is analogous to sentence diagramming, where one starts with a sequence of words and develops a representation of their syntactic and semantic relationships. One can similarly analyze Kodu programs by characterizing rules and recognizing relationships between rules. In this poster we describe "couplets", an analysis technique that reveals the presence within a program of an important Kodu design pattern called Pursue and Consume. Using this technique leads to accurate predictions about program behavior, and uncovers bugs if the pattern is not fully realized. As part of a study of 40 third graders who were learning Kodu, we provided brief instruction in the couplets technique. We found that they were able to apply couplets to 3-4 line programs and answer prediction questions with a roughly 85% success rate. Our results demonstrate that elementary school children can learn to reason abstractly about programs if given the right mental tools.
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关键词
Kodu,computational thinking,design patterns,program analysis,K-12 curriculum
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