Collaborative Learning with COZMO to Teach Programming in SCRATCH and Python

This paper presents a didactical concept based on the COZMO robot to teach introductory programming in SCRATCH and Python to students from diverse disciplines. It was developed to overcome two major problems in regular programming classes. First, it increases the motivation and involvement of students as it is based on active and collaborative learning with a haptic experience as opposed to a plain screen output. Second, it is designed as a homogenous concept that can be used for different learning objectives in a flexible way and thus improves set up times for lecturers while providing a consistent and reliable framework. Students work in groups of 3 to 5 people and have to solve small projects together by following instructions of different assignment papers. The assignments are based on each other and do not contain all information needed for the project but provide hints and references to gather the required material from different sources. The teacher is acting as a coach, while students learn self-directed. Evaluation results of our didactical concept show improvements in student motivation and an overall increased interest in programming and related skills. Lecturers report an improvement in achieving the overall course objectives by students due to the student-centred learning environment. The concept was used in engineering and non-engineering programming, robotics as well as agile project management classes.