Browsing by Subject "ohjelmointiympäristöt"

Programming will be a part of mathematics education in elementary schools in Autumn 2016. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of teaching and student related factors on learning to program. Previous research has focused on evaluating the effect of programming instruction to other abilities including problem solving and planning. There is no research summarizing factors that affect the ability to learn to program This study was done by reviewing existing research. Previous research was analyzed and central results were summarized. In order to improve the reliability of the results, the research focused on results that were achieved on multiple studies. Conflicting results were mentioned. Research material was searched using Google Scholar research search engine with search terms related to learning and teaching to program. Based on the results of this study, the programming achievement increases if teaching contains instruction, use of examples and student’s own discovery and practice. According to some studies, even minimal instruction resulted in good learning results, but according to other studies even a large amount of instruction was insufficient in gaining good results. The importance of practice and use of examples was mentioned in multiple studies. According to studies, learning was achieved by teaching with the help of programming environment. Graphical programming environments, in which programming is done with graphical tools, increases results. Graphical environment eliminates the need to focus on programming languages’ syntax. There was a link between programming achievement and student age. Student age combined with developmental stage limit the content that can be learned. Formal operation stage was seen as a requirement for advanced methods of programming. A link was found between mathematical ability and programming learning outcome and mathematical ability may be used to predict students’ ability to learn to program.