engleski

Analysis of school students' misconceptions about basic programming concepts

Background and Context. Most studies about programming misconceptions are conducted at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Since the age level for starting learning programming is getting lower, there is a need for determining programming misconceptions for younger learners. Objective. Our goal is to determine programming misconceptions and their time-resistance for programming novices at the K-12 level using Python as a text-based programming language. Method. We conducted research in the school settings during informatics classes among 98 fifth-grade students in three elementary schools. We analysed the data collected from two Python tests students took immediately after programming lectures and five months later. Results and Conclusions. We detected seven misconceptions: a) Assigning the expression instead of the calculated value, b) When reassigning the variable value, assigning the sum value to the variable, c) Using the symbolic name of the variable instead of its value, d) Using the first (or previously) assigned variable value, e) Datatype misconception, f) Sequencing misconception, and g) Swapping variable values. By shifting focus on variables and spending more time introducing variables and sequencing during teaching, the appearance of known misconceptions is minimised compared to previous findings. Implications. The findings can be used as a guideline when designing programming curricula to highlight these possible mistakes and prevent programming misconceptions. The educators should emphasise the underlying semantic (conceptual) programming concepts rather than syntactic ones related to the programming language.

K-12 ; misconceptions ; programming ; Python ; variables

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