Abstract:

The large amount of computing power and portability, combined with the wireless communication and mobile learning applications, transform the smart phones in learning devices.

The presented method in this paper, is used during the Object Oriented Programming course. The structure of this is 3 hours course plus 2 hours’ labs / 10 weeks + 2 weeks for evaluations. Teaching 3 hours programming using classical methods, a PowerPoint presentation can transform the course in a boring thing, is difficult to follow the teacher for a such long period.

To increase the interactivity of this course we combine classical pedagogical methods with quizzes on mobile devices. The students must to respond to this questions using their own mobile phones. Instruction which includes posing questions during lessons is more effective in producing achievement gains than instruction carried out without questioning students.

Before using smart mobile phones during the course, we checked if all students have such a device. Fortunately, all students have a smart phone. If there were students who don’t have such a device, we couldn't use the new method for reasons of discrimination.

Because the students perform better on test items previously asked as recitation questions than on items they have not been exposed to before, we use quizzes two times by course. First quizzes are at the beginig of course with question from the last course and the last quizzes are from the current course.

We use the Socrative Apps support for quizzes. The apps empower as to engage and assess our students as learning happens. Through the use of real-time questioning, result aggregation, and visualization, we have instant insight into levels of understanding. The teacher can see the students results in real time, for a single student or the statistics of global results. Student results populate the teacher’s screen as they submit answers to multiple choice, true/false, graded short answer, or open-response questions.

If the teacher gives instant feedback to the students for the questions with poor results, the level of understanding increase. In the same time, the real time response can be also a feedback for the teaching performance.

The paper presents the improvement of learning for a period of three years. From this analysis we extract many conclusions. The most important conclusions are related with the cognitive level of questions posed. Students who prefer lower cognitive questions perform better in recitations and on tests where lower cognitive questions are posed.

With the enhanced pedagogical learning strategies, learners obtain skill and knowledge in classroom.

Keywords:

Mobile learning, instant feedback.