Using Student-Developed Narratives to Improve Learning and Engagement in Computer Problem-Solving Courses
Cándido Cabo, Reneta Lansiquot · 2016
In our Computer Systems major, we require all students to take a problem-solving course (PS) to prepare them for subsequent courses in computer programming.As part of the PS course, students use flowchart interpreters to learn basic procedural programming concepts.Students often have difficulty translating word problems into flowcharts because they do not have a good understanding of the problem's domain.To write an effective computer program to solve a problem, programmers must first understand the problem.1,6,14,15 Thus, the student's inability to conceive of the problem intellectually may prevent them from creating an effective solution.The goal of our project was to create narratives (case-studies) that students could understand, relate to, and be engaged with, so they can be used as the contexts to learn problem-solving and procedural programming skills in the flowcharting component of the PS course.Since students know what is relevant to them, we selected a group of five students majoring in Computer Systems to help us develop those narratives.The use of student-developed narratives affected performance in different flowcharting structures (sequence, selection, repetition) differently.Overall, the data suggests that the use of case studies was beneficial for increasing performance in flowcharting assessments using selection structures, modestly beneficial in assessments using repetition structures, and of no benefit in assessments using just sequence.Despite the learning benefit, a majority of students and instructors were resistant to using case-studies in this course and thought that reading stories does not belong in a problem-solving/computer programming course.Therefore, novel approaches to engage students and instructors in interdisciplinary thinking and practice are necessary.