Improving Student Computer Programming Understanding and Engagement through Computer-Monitored Problem-Solving Discussions

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The project's significance and importance lie in its focus on addressing both the motivational aspects and conceptual learning barriers for students in early computer programming courses. In these courses the concepts become difficult with many computer science oriented students stalling in their college career. The project will apply modern ideas of group exercises in a highly interactive chat-room environment, where students will be accountable for helping each other and individually accountable for learning. The project's system will record and will then apply text analytics to student group interactions, summarizing for the instructor how well the student groups are functioning both socially and in problem solving. The goals and scope of the project are to develop new collaboration assignments that exercise Java programming language analytic and conceptual skills. At the same time the project will study how students engage with the exercises and how student enthusiasm can be increased. These studies underlie further development of the text classifier technology to monitor for cognitive, affective, and linguistic phenomena that are indicative of enthusiastic students actively discussing and learning. Some measurements, for example, whether the students evince enthusiasm, should be usable in a wide variety of other pedagogical domains. The project will assess how well this intervention succeeds in keeping students motivated, both within individual exercises and in their student careers.