Design and Evaluation of three IT Artifacts (Dr. SUST) for Increasing Students’ Engagement in Java Programming Course

Abstract

Programming is a discipline that requires ample amount of time to be dedicated to different learning activities to be mastered. Educators try to find ways to engage students and urge them to spend more time in learning and practicing programming. At Sudan University (SUST), programming is a fundamental subject to computing students which is usually taught during their first year of study, and that will affect their entire subsequent studies. The staff teaching programming subject are concerned because some students seem to be disengaged. Disengagement leads students not to dedicate all the possible time they get in performing programming learning related tasks. On the other hand, when students are engaged related research states that it is positively correlated with desirable learning outcomes, including: general abilities and critical thinking, cognitive development, student satisfaction, improved grades and persistence.Timely interference to help and support students could affect students’ engagement positively. Hence, personalized learning could help in providing detailed help and guidance to different students based on students’ details or students’ models. Personalized learning or adaptive systems that rely on user model/profile could be designed to meet individual students’ needs. This research aims at increasing and evaluating students’ engagement in programming learning using technology enhanced learning methods. Three artifacts were produced in this work to meet the research objectives: Firstly, the attributes contributing to students’ engagement were perceived from three sources: the literature, students’ quantitative and qualitative surveys, and from evaluating the usage of the designed solution. Secondly, overall technical details of the suggested solution and the design decisions were presented as an engaging adaptive model. And the final artifact was the design of the adaptive system DrSUST. There were three iterations in developing the technical solution. The last objective was to evaluate students’ engagement in the designed solution. To monitor students’ engagement while using the adaptive system, analyzing web system logs was performed. And hence, the following measurements were used to measure users’ engagement: Click-through rates, time spent on site or dwell time, frequency of return visits (during single or multiple sessions), number of tasks, and reading amount. Adaptive systems differ in their implementation based on the aspects of the design that need to be emphasized and improved in the system. In this work the emphasis was on increasing students’ engagement while learning programming. This was reflected in the design by involving the students early on in the implementation of the solution and studying their current situation and the aspects that they needed to be provided to achieve better engagement. After running the system for three iterations the attributes that were used for modeling the students are: navigation pointer, language, quizzes level and exercises level. The activities that were attractive to students were programs solutions sharing, questions and comments, simplified summary and quizzes. It was realized that students follow different paths when studying. Thus students could be categorized based on their learning styles according to the path they follow during learning. Some students prefer to continue reading without performing related quizzes and exercises and delaying these tasks to the end. While other students finish each topic along with the related work before moving to advance topics.