Can a Learning Companion Be Used to Continue Teaching Programming to Children Even During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Learning how to program in Primary Education has attracted significant research in recent years. It is unclear though how programming environments and languages should be adapted to children to achieve better learning and use, but one trend seems to be the use of Scratch. The question in this paper is what programming environment can be used to continue teaching programming to children who have already been taught Scratch for years. This paper's proposal is that students aged between 10 and 12 can benefit from interacting with a friendly learning companion using p-code such as Alcody. The hypothesis is that students (aged between 10 and 12) with a knowledge of Scratch will be able to significantly improve their scores by using a learning companion to teach them how to program even during the COVID-19 pandemic. To check the hypothesis, an experiment was carried out during the 2019/2020 academic year with 137 students in Ecuador. A significant improvement in the scores of the students was recorded together with high satisfaction.

Reflections on the Feedback Given Before and After Computer Science Programming Exercises from the Perspective of Lecturer and Student

En este artículo, se discute sobre los beneficios de proporcionar retroalimentación antes y después de ejercicios de programación para estudiantes de Ingeniería Informática. Se ha realizado un estudio comparativo en dos años diferentes del mismo curso impartidos por el mismo profesor. En el primer año, la retroalimentación sólo se proporcionó después de que cada ejercicio fuese completado; mientras que en el segundo año, la retroalimentación se proporcionó tanto antes como después de que cada ejercicio fuese completado. Los resultados confirman que incluso cuando el número de estudiantes es superior a cien, sigue siendo conveniente proporcionar retroalimentación antes y después de cada ejercicio de programación para conseguir que los estudiantes obtengan mejores calificaciones, y reducir la tasa de abandono a cero (AU)

In this paper, the question is discussed of whether it is worthwhile to devote time to providing feedback to undergraduate Computer Science students before and after they do programming exercises. A comparative study was carried out in two different years of the same course taught by the same lecturer. In the first year, feedback was only provided after each exercise was finished, while in the second year feedback was provided both before and after each exercise was finished. The results confirm that even when the number of students is higher than one hundred; it is still worthwhile to provide feedback before and after each Computer Science exercise to achieve better scores, and a drastic decrease in the drop-out rate, which was reduced to zero (AU)