Design of an educational multimedia library to teach Python to non-technical university students

Abstract

Starting from our teaching experience and previous research on programming for non-technical university students in Japan and Denmark, we identify an unarticulated dependency of programming materials from other technical domains, which causes a knowledge domain mismatch in learners. We approach this mismatch on two fronts: by defining a novel way to structure beginners courses that moves away from the classic bottom-up approach based on math-related problems, and instead leverages on multimedia as a motivational and powerful general-purpose domain to ground programming and scaffold its understanding; and via the design and implementation of new Python library that simplifies multimedia programming. We are currently organizing tests of both multimedia library and the new course structure in Japan and Denmark.