A statistical evaluation and assessment of an interactive elementary programming model – A systematic approach

Abstract

As the Indian economy grows to achieve India’s target of 5 trillion economy by 2024, high skilled labor force is a necessity. India being the youngest country in the world, it has to use leverage of its top position in computing services. In computing education, programming is considered to be the most challenging subject to learn and understand especially for new students. In the context of this research, a critical investigation of how to overcome this issue and how to resolve have been a focused area for the research community since last decade. Even with the advancement of technology, education sector is still not fully utilizing the technology. Therefore, it’s time that appropriate teaching methodology should be developed using interactive teaching curriculum to ease students' learning difficulty caused by lack of experience and necessary understanding. There are many theories investigated to enhance knowledge assimilation methodology. This research paper attempted to identify the important design principles by investigating learning theories and identifying the innovative approach engaged in educational teaching. Amongst many, two principal theories, first, theory of Constructivism and second, Cognitive Load theory have been identified and investigated. In addition, a qualitative and quantitative methods were applied to identify the gaps and challenges for beginners. An extensive survey targeting 560 people conducted which helped to identify the trends of current state of programming challenges and what can be done to improve it. 12 open ended interviews were conducted with programming tutors to get more insight into the current state of teaching and difficulties with students. Based on literature and data collection findings, this research proposes a theoretical process framework to design and develop visual programming instruction model. Then, the evaluation and assessment of the proposed research model conducted through quasi-experimental designs to understand the impact of it. Many factors were considered while analyzing the data collected through experiments with 60 odd first time programming students. A regression analysis was performed on the data to identify the mean, standard deviation, variances.  After the rigorous data quantification, a significant improvement was observed in VProEn users than Turbo C users earlier but in the longer run no significant evidence was found.