ClassCode: An Interactive Teaching and Learning Environment for Programming Education in Classrooms

Abstract: Programming education is becoming important as demands on computer literacy and coding skills are growing. Despite the increasing popularity of interactive online learning systems, many programming courses in schools have not changed their teaching format from the conventional classroom setting. We see two research opportunities here. Students may have diverse expertise and experience in programming. Thus, particular content and teaching speed can be disengaging for experienced students or discouraging for novice learners. In a large classroom, instructors cannot oversee the learning progress of each student, and have difficulty matching teaching materials with the comprehension level of individual students. We present ClassCode, a web-based environment tailored to programming education in classrooms. Students can take online tutorials prepared by instructors at their own pace. They can then deepen their understandings by performing interactive coding exercises interleaved within tutorials. ClassCode tracks all interactions by each student, and summarizes them to instructors. This serves as a progress report, facilitating the instructors to provide additional explanations in-situ or revise course materials. Our user evaluation through a small lecture and expert review by instructors and teaching assistants confirm the potential of ClassCode by uncovering how it could address issues in existing programming courses at universities.