Visualising the Code-in-Action Helps Students Learn Programming Skills
Theodor Wyeld, Minoru Nakayama · 2018
The need to know how to code for university graduates has become crucial if they are to achieve their goals of employment after graduation. Post-graduation jobs increasingly require some understanding of how programs work and are developed. The project reported here used HTML and JavaScript to introduce students to the core structure of coding. It uses code that produces a visual result which helps non-IT students overcome their fear of coding. Using an online HTML and JavaScript editor to create a 2D game for a mobile deice introduces students to some basic programming skills in a fun and creative way. This paper reports on a project that tracked before and after sentiment towards learning coding skills. It shows a shift in sentiment from a fear of coding to a better understanding of the potential of coding to produce creative outcomes. However, despite the shift in sentiment across the project, there was still too much reliance on external help - students were not able to initiate programming without some assistance. This suggests, along with the method described in this paper, other methods should also be explored.