Research insights: collaborative programming and worked examples

Our researchers at Raspberry Pi work to help us understand how people are learning computing and digital making. They talk to children, volunteers, and educators about their experiences, while also drawing on the research of academics and other organisations. Here we summarise the latest piece of research they worked on with Code Clubs, and we hear from Oliver Quinlan, our Senior Research Manager.

The research

In the Autumn term of 2017, the Raspberry Pi researchers worked with six school-based Code Clubs in England to try out a different approach to teaching programming. They wanted to observe the impact of ‘worked examples’: completed projects for the learners to explore, manipulate, and answer questions about. Their specific question was whether this type of teaching material encouraged collaboration between learners.

The six participating schools were split into two groups — one group was given six step-by-step projects structured very similarly to the standard Code Club projects, and the other group was given versions of the projects as worked examples. Both project sets covered the same concept: creating your own Scratch blocks (the Scratch version of defining your own procedures). The club members worked through these projects over several weeks, and in the final week, all the children from both groups got the same challenge to test their newly-learned understanding. Two of our researchers visited the clubs for this final session to observe the children and to interview the club leaders.

The researchers had two main aims:

1. Find out whether worked examples and discussion prompts encourage more collaborative digital making.
2. Explore whether worked examples and collaborative problem solving have an impact on children’s learning of a new programming topic.

Findings

Collaborative problem solving

The researchers found that collaboration among the Code Clubbers was the same in the two groups — worked examples had no influence on how the learners worked together. In addition, interviewing the club leaders and observing the young coders gave our researchers insight into the obstacles to successful peer collaboration in Code Club.

“Making collaborative problem solving successful depends on the right combination of many aspects, such as educator support, task design, and group features. Achieving this combination is often challenging in practice, as we found from working with the schools in this project.”

– Oliver Quinlan, Senior Research Manager at Raspberry Pi

Interestingly, one obstacle that they observed was that each club they visited had enough equipment to provide each child with a computer. This led the researchers to conclude that collaboration may be promoted by letting the children work in pairs using one computer. Oliver and his team also thought that Code Club leaders may need more support and information in order to facilitate collaborative problem solving among their learners.

Learning programming concepts

The team observed that using worked examples to teach programming concepts in Code Club had both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, ‘reverse engineering’ a completed project means learners can dive right in to learning more complex programming concepts and are not tempted to spend time choosing backgrounds and sprites. It also allows them to access programming concepts they haven’t seen before.

“I think it was quite good for pupils to have projects that they were mending rather than starting from scratch. When you do that, sometimes you don’t get beyond choosing the background and putting the sounds in. So it’s good to start with having it all there, doing a bit of coding and then I’d say, OK, you can change the background. Otherwise they just get caught up in kind of drawing.”

– Code Club leader

On the other hand, the step-by-step approach to learning gives children the experience of building their own program from the bottom up. And since Code Club’s aim is to motivate and empower children to get really creative with technology to explore their own interests, being able to open a blank Scratch file and build a complete, unique project is crucial.

“[A] mix of worked examples and then doing your own problems might work better. The children get to see the possibilities this way, but I’m not sure they internalise the learning in the same way without building something themselves. I would like more of an alternating structure.”

– Code Club leader

Impact for Code Club

Although this research did not show a true difference between the two types of projects in terms of collaborative problem solving, there are several things Code Club leaders can take away from it if they would like to encourage more collaboration in their clubs:

“Lots of children in clubs help each other when they are stuck, but there are other ways of collaborating too. Sometimes pairing children up with just one computer can encourage them to work together to think through their ideas. Showing them finished examples of programs can also really help them learn. It’s definitely not ‘cheating’ to have a look at someone’s finished project first — it can really help their understanding.”

– Oliver Quinlan, Senior Research Manager at Raspberry Pi

Share your stories with us!

Have you successfully encouraged collaboration between the children in your Code Club? Or have you tried out an alternative method of teaching that you would like to tell about?

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