Look What I Can Do: Acquisition of Programming Skills in the Context of Living Labs

There is scientific knowledge about how to teach software programming, and the necessity to foster young learners' interest in computer science is broadly addressed. However, there is a lack of research on how to teach programming skills in a way that increases the learners' interest in the topic. We present a training session for young students, in order to support the acquisition of programming skills and, at the same time, a positive view towards computer science. The programming environment is based on a visual block-based application within a living lab. Thus, the abstract concept of software programming is presented within a real context and tightly connected to real experiences. In this training, the learners were introduced to a living lab and to programming concepts in order to acquire basics of programming. Two user studies with 44 7th and 8th grade students were conducted, specifically, the students' interest in computer science and their acquisition of programming skills were assessed. Two instructional interventions to support knowledge acquisition, namely worked examples and instructional procedures, were compared. The results did not strongly support one of these instructional interventions, thus, both seem to be appropriate in order to help learners to acquire basic programming skills. In sum, the results show that the tight connection of the training session to a real-world scenario can foster programming skills. This paper contributes by showing the potential of using visual block-based programming in the context of living labs in order to enable students to begin with programming activities.