Pencil Puzzles for Introductory Computer Science: an Experience- and Gender-Neutral Context
Pencil Puzzles for Introductory Computer Science: an Experience- and Gender-Neutral Context
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计算机科学入门铅笔谜题：经验和性别中立的背景
DOI：
10.1145/3017680.3017765
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发表时间：
2017
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Kimberly Fluet
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Z. Butler;Ivona Bezáková;Kimberly Fluet
介绍计算机科学的教学可以受益于使用真实世界的上下文来建立抽象的编程概念。我们目前的领域铅笔拼图作为一个背景下，各种介绍CS主题。谜题是报纸和杂志上常见的谜题，读者只需用铅笔就可以通过推理来解决。一个著名的铅笔难题的例子是数独，它被广泛用作典型的回溯任务。然而，还有几十个其他久经考验和喜欢的铅笔谜题，它们可以自然地诱导计算思维，并可以用作许多CS主题的上下文，如数组，循环，递归，GUI，继承和图遍历。我们在本文中的贡献是双重的。首先，我们提出了一些铅笔拼图，并将它们映射到介绍CS概念，这些拼图可以在作业中针对这些概念，并将读者指向其他拼图库，这些拼图库提供了导致几乎无限的介绍CS作业的可能性。第二，我们已经正式评估了过去三年来我们机构使用的这种任务的有效性。学生们报告说，他们已经学习了材料，相信他们可以解决类似的问题，并提高了他们的编码技能。与同一主题的传统作业相比，这些作业还导致了更高比例的主动陈述的享受，以及元认知。最后，除了一个任务，学生的性别或以前的编程经验是独立的，他们的成绩，他们的看法和对任务的反思。
The teaching of introductory computer science can benefit from the use of real-world context to ground the abstract programming concepts. We present the domain of pencil puzzles as a context for a variety of introductory CS topics. Pencil puzzles are puzzles typically found in newspapers and magazines, intended to be solved by the reader through the means of deduction, using only a pencil. A well-known example of a pencil puzzle is Sudoku, which has been widely used as a typical backtracking assignment. However, there are dozens of other well-tried and liked pencil puzzles available that naturally induce computational thinking and can be used as context for many CS topics such as arrays, loops, recursion, GUIs, inheritance and graph traversal. Our contributions in this paper are two-fold. First, we present a few pencil puzzles and map them to introductory CS concepts that the puzzles can target in an assignment, and point the reader to other puzzle repositories which provide the potential to lead to an almost limitless set of introductory CS assignments. Second, we have formally evaluated the effectiveness of such assignments used at our institution over the past three years. Students reported that they have learned the material, believe they can tackle similar problems, and have improved their coding skills. The assignments also led to a significantly higher proportion of unsolicited statements of enjoyment, as well as metacognition, when compared to a traditional assignment for the same topic. Lastly, for all but one assignment, the student's gender or prior programming experience was independent of their grade, their perceptions of and reflection on the assignment.