RESEARCH ON ONLINE PROGRAMMING EDUCATIONAL TOOL: CASE STUDY ON A THREE-IN-ONE ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

"In the field of information education, the introductory course of programming is a threshold. It is often the first course faced by students with no or little background knowledge. For learning unfamiliar and difficult things, students will inevitably be vulnerable and give up their learning. Hence, it is necessary to help students correctly cultivate the concept of computational thinking to assist them in their learning process to reduce learning difficulties as well as enhance interest. Our research team designed an online programming educational tool that is based on Python, Scratch, and activity diagrams. The purpose is to help students learn the basic concepts in the introductory programming courses. Users can just connect to the website to learn and many convenient functions are added to record the learning process. The Python part is provided for non-primary school students to learn and the Scratch part is for primary school students to learn logical concepts. Also, there is an activity diagram to increase students' interest in learning and reduce learning difficulties. The questionnaire data were collected at the beginning and end of the course and the results were finally analyzed. By analyzing the questionnaires collected and analyzing the data content, we can see that the results of this experiment have improved the students' learning process. However, the operation of the tool has also received feedback from students. Our designed features need to be closer to the user, and it is expected to assist more learning content, not only at the beginning of programming but also in the future to assist in more advanced programming learning. Compared with traditional teaching, this research uses tools to assist learning so that students can better understand the working principle of coding."