Collaborative Learning Environment to Improve Novice Programmer with Convincing Opinions

摘要

At the present, many universities do not have enough teaching staffs for programming training. The teacher cannot give suggestions in a timely fashion to all of the students who need guidance for their programming problems. The training condition reduces motivation to learn programming of the students. We propose a model to promote collaborative learning among the students. In the model, the students are combined into small groups to practice programming. Although every group member has to do programming independently, they are encouraged to share programming problems with other group members to find out solution. The voting mechanism is applied to each group. If a group member gives an opinion which is evaluated convincing one, the member is rewarded by others with COOP points. For effective collaboration of students in each group, we combine students based on two features of each student. One is programming ability, which are scores of the source codes. The other is contribution to group, which are COOP points accumulated during the collaborative learning. Using the model, we developed a collaborative learning environment, Col-E. The Col-E has been applied to actual classes in Ritsumeikan university, Japan. The experiment results show that Col-E has good possibilities to improve any kinds of students.