Evaluating the effectiveness of toggle function for card operation-based programming learning support system

In many cases, programming classes in higher educational institutions have desired a system that supports students to concentrate on the essential learning task intended by the instructor. Then, focusing on thinking about the relations of meaningful parts, a card operation-based programming learning support system, COPS, was developed. This system targets to think only the relations of meaningful parts called chunks consisting of one or more statements and aims to control cognitive resources by limiting the patterns of learning activity. Through the practical use of an actual programming class, COPS was able to make learners concentrate on the intended learning task with reducing cognitive load. However, since COPS simplifies learning activities, there is a possibility that COPS doesn’t have more learning effectiveness than the typical coding exercise. Therefore, to make COPS close to the learning activity of actual programming, we focus on the toggle function. The toggle function is a select box placed on the card, and it requires the user to learn to choose one statement from two or more statements. Thus, the toggle function would make the learning task of COPS closer to actual programming learning. This paper shows the detail of the design and implementation of the toggle function to COPS.