“Hear” and “Play” Students Misconceptions on Concurrent Programming using Sonic Pi

IF 2.1 Q1 EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

Informatics in Education Pub Date : 2024-04-24 DOI:10.15388/infedu.2024.22

Daniele Traversaro, Giorgio Delzanno, Giovanna Guerrini

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Abstract

Concurrency is a complex to learn topic that is becoming more and more relevant, such that many undergraduate Computer Science curricula are introducing it in introductory programming courses. This paper investigates the combined use of Sonic Pi and Team-Based Learning to mitigate the difficulties in early exposure to concurrency. Sonic Pi, a domain-specific music language, provides great support for “playing” with concurrency and “hearing” common problems such as data races and lack of synchronization among different concurrent threads. More specifically, the paper focuses on students’ misconceptions regarding concurrency in Sonic Pi, and compares them to those arising in traditional concurrent programming languages. In addition, it preliminarily explores knowledge transfer from Sonic Pi to C/C++. The approach has been applied in two teaching experiments with undergraduate students in our University involving 184 participants. Our investigations bring out the need to address misconceptions through targeted interventions for a clear understanding of concurrent programming concepts. Sonic Pi’s simplified abstraction and domain-specific flavor has demonstrated to be effective, especially for first-year students.

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用 Sonic Pi "听 "和 "玩 "学生对并行编程的误解

并发是一个复杂的学习课题，它正变得越来越重要，因此许多本科计算机科学课程都在编程入门课程中引入了并发。本文研究了如何结合使用 Sonic Pi 和团队学习来减轻早期接触并发的困难。Sonic Pi 是一种特定领域的音乐语言，它为 "玩 "并发和 "听 "常见问题（如数据竞赛和不同并发线程之间缺乏同步）提供了极大的支持。更具体地说，本文重点关注学生在 Sonic Pi 中对并发性的误解，并将其与传统并发编程语言中出现的误解进行比较。此外，本文还初步探讨了从 Sonic Pi 到 C/C++ 的知识迁移。该方法已在我校本科生的两次教学实验中应用，共有 184 人参加。我们的调查表明，有必要通过有针对性的干预来解决误解，从而清晰地理解并发编程概念。Sonic Pi 的简化抽象和特定领域风味已被证明是有效的，尤其是对一年级学生。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Informatics in Education EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH-

CiteScore

6.10

自引率

3.70%

发文量

审稿时长

20 weeks

期刊介绍： INFORMATICS IN EDUCATION publishes original articles about theoretical, experimental and methodological studies in the fields of informatics (computer science) education and educational applications of information technology, ranging from primary to tertiary education. Multidisciplinary research studies that enhance our understanding of how theoretical and technological innovations translate into educational practice are most welcome. We are particularly interested in work at boundaries, both the boundaries of informatics and of education. The topics covered by INFORMATICS IN EDUCATION will range across diverse aspects of informatics (computer science) education research including: empirical studies, including composing different approaches to teach various subjects, studying availability of various concepts at a given age, measuring knowledge transfer and skills developed, addressing gender issues, etc. statistical research on big data related to informatics (computer science) activities including e.g. research on assessment, online teaching, competitions, etc. educational engineering focusing mainly on developing high quality original teaching sequences of different informatics (computer science) topics that offer new, successful ways for knowledge transfer and development of computational thinking machine learning of student''s behavior including the use of information technology to observe students in the learning process and discovering clusters of their working design and evaluation of educational tools that apply information technology in novel ways.

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