Improving Programming Learning on High School Students through Educative Apps

Teaching programming to High School students is not an easy task. Usually, they have not yet decided what they would like to major in, as in a Computer Science degree, therefore their lack of motivation may need higher doses of creativity from their teachers trying to attract them. Recently, on Education there is a tendency to implement active learning paradigms where students are the focus of the educational process. An instantiation of these learning methods are gaming environments. This article presents FunJava, a smartphone App for learning programming skills through a virtual teacher that presents the leveled content of an introduction to programming course in Java and offers games to test themselves as they play with other classmates. The system has been evaluated during the academic course 2016-17 by 144 High School students of K-11 and K-10 (16 and 15 years old) and our results indicate that using FunJava had a most positive influence in the students learning. Moreover, the opinion of students reflects that they really enjoyed working with the system and increased the engagement with the course.