Socio-cultural Approach to the Design of CSCL Environment for Computer Programming Education: Development and Evaluation of a Program Competition Game 'AlgoArena'

摘要

A Sumo wrestling 8imulation game 'AlgoArena', aiming at basic computer programming education for novices, was developed. A learner is supposed to write a program implementing a wrestler's tactics so that he/she can enjoy the game with colleague. The learner is required to become skillful in comprehensive programming, which includes analysis, planning, evaluation, as well as program writing, if he/she wants to elaborate flexible and strong program enough to beat some others. We developed a community-oriented method for designing learn- ing environment based on situated learning theory, in which social setting as a bout game was applied to construct a learner's community of practice in order to accomplish learning by participation. We conducted two experiments to examine how well they learned programming at two municipal junior high schools. As the results, it turned out that learners in both schools were highly motivated and successfully acquired the knowledge of basic control structures. In addition, we also conducted a participatory observation at one of the junior high schools to investigate how learners develop their identity in the community of programming parrtice. An ethnomethodological analysis revealed that the learners gradually develop their identity as a programmer, which endorses the occurrence of learning by participation.