Understanding the Strategy Selection of Primary School Students in aBlock Based Programming Environment

Block-based programming is one of the most used methods for programming educationfor kids. Its simplistic nature makes it suitable for teaching students thefundamentals of coding along with computers working principles. With differentplatforms and game setups, students are generally free to solve problems by theirstrategies. To understand the student’s approaches to problems, a dataset containingthe event sequence of students in a block-based programming environment isused. Furthermore, an algorithm for evaluating the student’s understanding of thegiven education is an important task that can facilitate programming educationusing these technologies by providing feedback to both students and teachers. Bycomparing students’ code and action sequences for solving problems with expert approachesbased on the subject shown in class, it has been examined to see whetherstudents have implemented the given methods or chose to play their way. The carriedout research shows that using end-code comparison is a promising method thatcan help to determine the strategy selection of students when used with clusteringtechniques. The experiments with the developed method showed that the studentswho chose to go write code in the best way they knew by not implementing the newlyshown concepts performed better than the students who tried to use them. Alongwith the coding strategies of students, it is also crucial to evaluate the performancesof male and female students to determine if there exists any significant differenceto provide a system that focuses on students’ strengths and weaknesses to enhancetheir learning experience. The statistical analysis has shown a difference betweenmale and female students where males have a higher mean score than females. The effects of game setup are also taken into consideration in this thesis by conductingexperiments based on a competitive game mode to analyse the effects of competitiveness.The results demonstrate that competitive game setup does not change theeffect of strategy selection on performance. By creating a method for code similarityin block-based environments and analyzing the performance of students fromvarious perspectives, we aim to propose a robust method for these evaluations.