Towards a Catalog of Gestures for M-learning Applications for the Teaching of Programming

Teaching of programming disciplines is mandatory in several CS courses worldwide. However, this domain still faces limitations and challenges. While these limitations continue to be a reality in classrooms, mobile devices have earned more and more users and, as a consequence, the development of mobile learning applications is rapidly growing as well. Based on the limitations in such domain, on the increasing popularity of mobile devices and on their capability to support the teaching and learning processes through their hardware specificities, in this paper we propose a catalog of gestures for mobile learning applications to be adopted in the teaching of programming. The proposed catalog also provides a way to investigate if mobile devices may motivate students to learning to programming. Four steps were conducted in this work. Firstly, primary studies that propose surface gestures interfaces were identified. Secondly, a list of main commands and programming codes were analyzed and selected to be represented by graphical gestures. Thirdly, the returned primary studies were used to propose a catalog of gestures for those code structures. With two or three possible gestures for each code structure, an evaluation to identify which of those gestures were preferred among undergraduate students was conducted. Based on the results of 69 participants, the final catalog was defined. Finally, in a fourth moment, a gesture recognition application tool was used to perform a usability evaluation. Preliminary evidences suggested the catalog can adequately support m-learning applications for the teaching of programming. Furthermore, the catalog pointed out a positive feedback that can bring a more attractive way for coding, when considered the adoption of mobile devices’ small keyboards.