Enabling Independent Learning of Programming Concepts through Programming Completion Puzzles — Kyle Harms by Felienne Hermans.
From the post:
There are lots of puzzle programming tutorials currently in fashion: Code.org, Gidget and Parson’s programming puzzles. But, we don’t really know if they work? There is work [1] that shows that completion exercises do work well, but what about puzzles? That is what Kyle wants to find out.
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Felienne is live blogging presentations from VL/HCC 2015 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric.
The post is quick read and should generate interest in both programming completion puzzles as well as similar puzzles for authoring topic maps.
There is a pre-print: Enabling Independent Learning of Programming Concepts through Programming Completion Puzzles.
Before you question the results based on the sample size, 27 students, realize that is 27 more test subjects than a database project to replace all the outward services for 5K+ users. Fortunately, very fortunately, a group was able to convince management to tank the entire project. Quite a nightmare and slur on “agile development.”
The lesson here is that puzzles are useful and some test subjects are better than no test subjects at all.
Suggestions for topic map puzzles?