Thinking out of the Box

Thinking out of the Box: Comparing metaphors for variables in programming education

Hermans, F.F.J. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Swidan, A.A.S. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Aivaloglou, E.A. (Open University of the Netherlands)
Smit, M.I.E. (TU Delft Software Engineering)

2018

When teaching novices programming, misconceptions can occur. Misconception are incorrect beliefs about certain programming concept. For example, some novices think that a variable can hold multiple values, in the case of two consecutive assignment statements, such as x = 5; x = 7. While explaining variables introductory materials often use the metaphor of a box for a variable, which might contribute to the 'multiple values' hypothesis. To investigate this, we design and run a controlled experiment with 496 novice programmers, both children and adults. Half of our participants receive an introductory programming lesson in which we explain a variable as a box, while the other half of participants receive the explanation of a variable as being a label. They are subsequently questioned about their understanding of variables. Our results show that, for the simple questions involving one assignment, the box group performs better. However, for questions involving the misconception - with two consecutive assignment statements - the label group outperforms the box group. This however primarily occurs when considering variables of type string, for integers subjects interpret the statements as numeric values to be added.

Misconceptions
Programming education
Scratch

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:0a7068f3-0ef8-4db4-9c53-7dbb56759b3b

https://doi.org/10.1145/3265757.3265765

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York

978-1-4503-6588-8

Proceedings of the 13th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education, WiPSCE 2018

13th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education, WiPSCE 2018, 2018-10-04 → 2018-10-06, Potsdam, Germany

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2018 F.F.J. Hermans, A.A.S. Swidan, E.A. Aivaloglou, M.I.E. Smit