Abstract:

Programming learning is a basic course of computer science curriculum. In these days, one of the most import educational objects in computer science course is to improve the computational problem solving and logical thinking abilities. To achieve these educational objects, a lot of researches have been accomplished in cooperative learning which focuses on the activity of students. Among them, several models are developed focused on a targeted subject such as TAI (Team-Assisted Individualization) for mathematics and CIRC (Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition) for language. However, the previous models are not suitable for programming learning because programming learning has the distinguishing characteristics such as the diversity of solutions to one problem, one-to-one tutoring, and procedural learning.

In this paper, we suggest a new cooperative learning presentation method named Phased Pilgrim Propagation (PPP) which is suitable for programming learning in the field of computer science education. Our method is based on a group investigation approach and is designed to well reflect the distinguishing characteristics of programming learning. All students of the listener group are divided into N small groups and all member of the presenter group are also broken up into N small-groups. All presenters introduce the same part of the team’s result at the same time. But presenters don’t stay in one small-group but turn around like a pilgrim.

There are several advantages of our PPP method. Firstly, all presentation members announced all prepared presentation materials at the same time. Therefore, all students of the presentation group must have a sense of responsibility for preparing the entire material. Secondly, it can reduce a qualitative imbalance between the listener groups because presenters turn around all the listener groups. Thirdly, all students can evaluate the presenters individually. Fourthly, all presentations are performed according to the order of contents, which is appropriate to the procedural characteristics of programming learning courses. The most important advantage is that one-to-one personal helping is possible because all presentations are performed in a small group.

The result of our experiment performed in the fall 2014 semester shows that PPP has meaningful educational effect on study achievement and the enhancement of creativity in the field of computer science.

Keywords:

Cooperative Learning Presentation, Programming learning, Phased Pilgrim Propagation, Computer Science Creativity.