Making the Case for Adaptive Parsons problems and Task-Specific Programming: Koli Calling 2019 Preview

I am excited to be presenting at the 19th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (see site here). Both Barbara Ericson and I have papers this year. This was my third submission to Koli, and my first acceptance. Both of us had multiple rejections from ICER this year (see my blog post on ICER), so we updated and revised based on reviews, and were thrilled to get papers into Koli.

Investigating the Affect and Effect of Adaptive Parsons Problems

By Barbara Ericson, Austin McCall, and Kathryn Cunningham.

Barb is presenting the capstone to her dissertation work on adaptive Parsons problems (see blog post on her dissertation work here). This paper captures the iterative nature of her study. Early on, she did detailed think-aloud/interview protocols with teachers to understand how people used her adaptive Parsons problems. At the end, she looked at log files to get a sense of use at scale.

Abstract: In a Parsons problem the learner places mixed-up code blocks in the correct order to solve a problem. Parsons problems can be used for both practice and assessment in programming courses. While most students correctly solve Parsons problems, some do not. Un- successful practice is not conducive to learning, leads to frustration, and lowers self-efficacy. Ericson invented two types of adaptation for Parsons problems, intra-problem and inter-problem, in order to decrease frustration and maximize learning gains. In intra-problem adaptation, if the learner is struggling, the problem can dynamically be made easier. In inter-problem adaptation, the next problem’s difficulty is modified based on the learner’s performance on the last problem. This paper reports on the first observational studies of five undergraduate students and 11 secondary teachers solving both intra-problem adaptive and non-adaptive Parsons problems. It also reports on a log file analysis with data from over 8,000 users solving non-adaptive and adaptive Parsons problems. The paper reports on teachers’ understanding of the intra-problem adaptation process, their preference for adaptive or non-adaptive Parsons problems, their perception of the usefulness of solving Parsons problems in helping them learn to fix and write similar code, and the effect of adaptation (both intra-problem and inter-problem) on problem correctness. Teachers understood most of the intra-problem adaptation process, but not all. Most teachers preferred adaptive Parsons problems and felt that solving Parsons problems helped them learn to fix and write similar code. Analysis of the log file data provided evidence that learners are nearly twice as likely to correctly solve adaptive Parsons problems than non-adaptive ones.

Task-Specific Programming Languages for Promoting Computing Integration: A Precalculus Example

By Mark Guzdial and Bahare Naimipour

This is my first paper on the work I’m publishing on the new work I’m doing in task-specific programming. I mostly discuss my first prototype (see link here) and some of what math teachers are telling me (see link here). We also include a report on Bahare’s and my work with social studies educators A good bit of this paper is putting task-specific programming in a computing education context. I see what I’m doing as pushing further microworlds.

Typically, a microworld is built on top of a general-purpose language, e.g., Logo for Papert and Boxer for diSessa. Thus, the de- signer of the microworld could assume familiarity with the syntax and semantics of the programming language, and perhaps some general programming concepts like mutable variables and control structures. The problem here is that Logo and Boxer, like any general-purpose programming language, take time to develop proficiency. A task-specific programming language (TSPL) aims to provide the same easy-to-understand operations for a microworld, but with a language designed for a particular purpose.

Here’s the abstract:

Abstract: A task-specific programming language (TSPL) is a domain-specific programming language (in programming languages terms) designed for a particular user task (in human-computer interaction terms). Users of task-specific programming are able to use the tool to complete useful tasks, without prior training, in a short enough period that one can imagine fitting it into a normal class (e.g., around 10 minutes). We are designing a set of task-specific programming languages for use in social studies and precalculus courses. Our goal is offer an alternative to more general purpose programming languages (such as Scratch or Python) for integrating computing into other disciplines. An example task-specific programming language for precalculus offers a concrete context: An image filter builder for learning basic matrix arithmetic (addition and subtraction) and matrix multiplication by a scalar. TSPLs allow us to imagine a research question which we couldn’t ask previously: How much computing might students learn if they used a multiple TSPLs in each subject in each primary and secondary school grade?

Eventually the papers are going to appear in the ACM Digital Library. I have a preprint version of Barb’s paper here, and a longer form (with bigger screenshots) of my paper here.