LAYOUT FOR LEARNING - Designing an Interface for Students Learning to Program

Suzan Badri, James Denholm-Price, James Orwell

2011

Abstract

Many students have difficulty learning to program. It is conjectured that this difficulty may be increased by a disorganisation of the resources available to the student while they are learning. The unfamiliarity of terms and concepts, and frustration with mysterious errors, is exacerbated by the struggle with multiple windows and the attempt to memorize patterns which would be better viewed concurrently. As a consequence, a layout for learning programming is proposed: the aim of the proposal is to ensure that the students can easily arrange for the relevant resources to be displayed concurrently, without further manipulation of the application windows. Three types of resource are considered: the editor, the question sheet (instructions) and further reference resources such as glossaries, descriptions of concepts and common tasks. An HTML template is proposed to accommodate these last two types of resource. It is designed to allow all three materials to be positioned and selected and thereby allow for the concurrent display of the relevant resources. An evaluation of these proposals is presented, and the prospects for further development are considered.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Badri S., Denholm-Price J. and Orwell J. (2011). LAYOUT FOR LEARNING - Designing an Interface for Students Learning to Program . In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-8425-49-2, pages 324-332. DOI: 10.5220/0003346403240332

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu11,
author={Suzan Badri and James Denholm-Price and James Orwell},
title={LAYOUT FOR LEARNING - Designing an Interface for Students Learning to Program},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,},
year={2011},
pages={324-332},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003346403240332},
isbn={978-989-8425-49-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,
TI - LAYOUT FOR LEARNING - Designing an Interface for Students Learning to Program
SN - 978-989-8425-49-2
AU - Badri S.
AU - Denholm-Price J.
AU - Orwell J.
PY - 2011
SP - 324
EP - 332
DO - 10.5220/0003346403240332