Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

First exposure to Arduino through peer-coaching: Impact on students' attitudes towards programming

2017; Elsevier BV; Volume: 76; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.chb.2017.07.007

1873-7692

Pablo Martín‐Ramos, Maria João Lopes, M. Margarida Lima da Silva, Pedro E.B. Gomes, Pedro Silva, José Paulo Domingues, Manuela Ramos Silva,

Experimental Learning in Engineering

In this paper we report the work that jeKnowledge (Júnior Empresa da Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologias da Universidade de Coimbra), a student-led initiative, has done in the 'jeKnowledge academy' courses to actively engage Portuguese high-school students in STEM education through hands-on projects based on the low-cost Arduino platform. F2F activities, based on a peer-assisted learning strategy, were complemented with tutorials and more advanced project suggestions in a blog. Pre and post surveys on students' attitudes towards programming and peer-coaching were administered to pre-university and first year college participants, finding an overall increase in the Likert scale for all the programming-related constructs under study (confidence, interest, gender, usefulness and professional) after the introductory course. As regards the peer-based learning approach, younger students seemed to be more eager to be taught in a less formal way than their older counterparts. The course resulted in high degrees of satisfaction for both the student tutors and their tutees.