Cognitive Load and Conversation Analysis of using Visual Programming Language in Pair Programming activities

• Main Authors: Chia-Yin Tsai, 蔡佳穎
• Other Authors: Chih-Kai Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/k8mkpr

碩士 === 國立臺南大學 === 數位學習科技學系碩博士班 === 103 === Research results from computer science education show that pair programming is an effective teaching strategy. For it can reduce programming errors, improve the quality of programming, shorten the project timing, and make learners feel more confident. Pair programming can also be developed to another way of learning, which is distributed pair programming, two learners can perform pair programming at different places. But because the results are hard to control, distributed pair programming is rarely being used in teaching programs, even though there are some positive outcomes from research results, these outcomes are mostly from short term, specific, or small sample researches. Furthermore, most of the studies of cognitive load and learning programming are focus on teamwork or single person, studies of cognitive load and learning programming on pair programming are hard to find, and none of those studies is designed for distributed pair programming, nor the comparison between three different types of teaching strategy. The study compares the cognitive loads for the visual programming language, called StarLogo TNG, under three circumstances that is alone, pair programming, and distributed pair programming with 44 subjects. During the experiment, we recorded the data from those three circumstances, collected the conversations between students during the coding process, and used conversation analysis to conduct to possible behavior patterns. The experimental results show that learners prefer pair programming to designing programs alone, and there is no significant difference between the individual programming and distributed pair programming. The result of encoded conversation dialog shows that the first quarter of the time, subjects are mostly dealing with solar energy object; the second quarter of the time is heat object; the third quarter is setup object; and the final quarter is runtime object.