Encouraging Programming Learning for Novices with Grouping and Convincing Opinions

For students who begin to learn programming, there are quite a few difficulties to cope with. The best way to help these students is to provide adequate supervisors. However, in many universities, due to shortage of teachers, one teacher has to take care a big number of novices. When a student need helps, it often fails to reach the teacher because the teacher is being busy to supervise other students. Because the novices do not know how to continue their work, their motivation is degraded easily, which may makes them quit the class. To help the novices to be able to overcome difficulties right from the initial stage of programming learning, we propose a collaborative learning model regarding learners as opinion sources. It adopts a voting mechanism to improve the learning collaboration. Student are divided into small groups. They practice programming individually. A COOP point is voted to reward group members who have offered convincing opinions to others. COOP points are used as a measure of student contribution to group learning. A collaborative learning environment based on the model, Col-E, has been developed and applied for 50 students learning C programming language in Danang Educational University in Vietnam. The result shows that Col-E works well to improve programming ability and motivation of students.