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About Programming Maturity in Finnish High Schools: A Comparison Between High School and University Students' Programming Skills

Authors:

Mikko-Jussi LaaksoAuthors Info & Claims

ITiCSE '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

Pages 122 - 127

https://doi.org/10.1145/3059009.3059021

Published: 28 June 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In this study, we compare students' ability to learn and master a variety of computer programming concepts in two different student groups. The first group consists of 64 university level students with various backgrounds (adult control), and the second group consists of 40 Finnish junior high school students of age 15 (adolescent treatment group). Neither group had significant prior programming experience. Both groups were taught a similar semester-long introductory course on Python programming, using the same learning management system (LMS). We find that for almost all of the concepts, both groups perform equally well, but students in the adolescent treatment group perform significantly worse when learning the concepts of loop structures and repetition. The results are further compared to the lecture surveys that were collected from the junior high school course to further explain the causes of the findings. Based on the results and the teaching methods that are presented in this paper, we are able to show that adolescent junior high school students and adult university students have similar abilities to learn abstract computer science concepts using a fully functional programming environment.

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Digital Library

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Digital Library

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T. Rajala, E. Kaila, J. Holvitie, R. Haavisto, M.-J. Laakso, and T. Salakoski. Comparing the collaborative and independent viewing of program visualizations. In Frontiers in Education 2011 conference, October 12-15, Rapid City, South Dakota, USA, 2011.

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Digital Library

Cited By

Rosário ADias J(2022)Learning Management Systems in EducationDigital Active Methodologies for Educative Learning Management10.4018/978-1-6684-4706-2.ch003(47-77)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-4706-2.ch003
Mirolo CIzu CScapin E(2020)High-school students' mastery of basic flow-control constructs through the lens of reversibilityProceedings of the 15th Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education10.1145/3421590.3421603(1-10)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3421590.3421603
Vahrenhold JCutts QFalkner K(2019)Schools (K–12)The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research10.1017/9781108654555.019(547-583)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2019
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108654555.019
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

About Programming Maturity in Finnish High Schools: A Comparison Between High School and University Students' Programming Skills
1. Applied computing
  1. Education
    1. Interactive learning environments
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computational thinking
      2. Computing education programs
        Computer science education
        CS1
        Information science education

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ITiCSE '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

June 2017

412 pages

ISBN:9781450347044

DOI:10.1145/3059009

Conference Chairs:
Renzo Davoli
University of Bologna, Italy
,
Michael Goldweber
Xavier University, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Guido Rößling
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
,
Irene Polycarpou
University of Central Lancashire, Cyprus

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGCSE: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 28 June 2017

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ITiCSE '17

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SIGCSE

ITiCSE '17: Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

July 3 - 5, 2017

Bologna, Italy

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ITiCSE '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 56 of 175 submissions, 32%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 552 of 1,613 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

Rosário ADias J(2022)Learning Management Systems in EducationDigital Active Methodologies for Educative Learning Management10.4018/978-1-6684-4706-2.ch003(47-77)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-4706-2.ch003
Mirolo CIzu CScapin E(2020)High-school students' mastery of basic flow-control constructs through the lens of reversibilityProceedings of the 15th Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education10.1145/3421590.3421603(1-10)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3421590.3421603
Vahrenhold JCutts QFalkner K(2019)Schools (K–12)The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research10.1017/9781108654555.019(547-583)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2019
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108654555.019
(2019)The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research10.1017/9781108654555Online publication date: 15-Feb-2019
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108654555
Kaila ELaakso MRajala TMakelainen ALokkila E(2018)Technology-enhanced programming courses for upper secondary school students2018 41st International Convention on Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics (MIPRO)10.23919/MIPRO.2018.8400128(0683-0688)Online publication date: May-2018
https://doi.org/10.23919/MIPRO.2018.8400128
Kaila ELaakso MKurvinen E(2018)Teaching future teachers to code — Programming and computational thinking for teacher students2018 41st International Convention on Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics (MIPRO)10.23919/MIPRO.2018.8400127(0677-0682)Online publication date: May-2018
https://doi.org/10.23919/MIPRO.2018.8400127

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