Technology-enhanced programming courses for upper secondary school students

Nowadays, it is typical to integrate programming into curriculum in upper secondary school level. However, there are rarely existing models or materials offered to teachers for teaching the courses. With this in mind, we have designed and developed two upper secondary school level programming courses which utilize educational technology in all areas extensively. The first course is about introductory programming concepts in Python, and the second course about object-oriented programming in Java. The courses emphasize gamification and active learning via tutorial-based educational model. In this model, each lecture is accompanied with a tutorial which combines learning materials with automatically assessed programming exercises. The teachers are provided with ready-to-use materials for all other areas of the course as well, including e.g. lecture slides, weekly exercises, course projects with model answers, and electronic exam. All materials are customizable to suit different students and learning styles. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the courses, and provide results and experiences from three instances where the courses were utilized in upper secondary schools. Based on the results, it seems that the courses are both effective and motivating to students, and have received excellent feedback from the teachers utilizing them.