Personalizando atividades para estimular o engajamento de aprendizes de programação.

Abstract

Programming learning involves several factors, including teaching and assessment strategies, and those related to students, such as engagement. In recent years, engagement has stood out for involving essential aspects, such as behavior and attitudes inside and outside the classroom, cognitive effort, and sensations experienced in the programming learning process. Computer course students have low engagement if they are compared the level of student engagement using the National Survey of Student Engagement instrument of other students. About this, the specialists’ criticism is about the adequacy of the engagement indicators used by the tool to the nature of the computing course. Considering that introductory programming courses are identified as the cause of significant levels of anxiety and frustration, some experts criticize the lack of emphasis on studies on the emotional aspect of student engagement. This is because there is a greater interest in analyzing what students do, instead of understanding affective responses to the learning process. Gradually, strategies to help students develop more positive attitudes have received considerable attention in the literature. In this research, we investigate the difficulty of stimulating and measuring student engagement in programming learning activities. For this, we developed a model for personalizing activities and defined metrics to represent the engagement of programming learners. We carry out qualitative experimental and case studies to understand the effects on student engagement of the application of the personalization proposal. Our results suggest that the application of personalized activities influences emotional engagement, improving positive emotions, such as those linked to power, tranquility, productivity, and reducing the feeling of negative emotions, such as sadness and astonishment. While we are unable to perceive influence on the cognition and behavioral aspects of engagement when implemented with the proposed metrics.