Investigating Themes of Student-Generated Analogies
Colton Harper, Ryan Bockmon, Stephen Cooper · 2023
Student-generated analogies hold potential in facilitating understanding of abstract computing concepts, as they exercise valuable computing skills, such as abstraction, re-representation, and relational reasoning. Helping students develop their own analogies is difficult, and limited research exists on scaffolding for student-generated analogies in computing education and STEM education more broadly. This exploratory study examines an open-ended student-generated analogy process, for the concept of variable scope within an introductory computer science course. The primary goal of this study is to lay the foundation for scaffolding strategies to more fully realize the potential of student-generated analogy as an educational tool.