Interactive Learning System
System for investigating the learning effects of concreteness fading with comics
In the 1st year of my Ph.D., I developed an interactive learning system to investigate the learning effects of a learning progression based on Bruner’s framework for concreteness fading.
Concreteness fading is an instructional technique for teaching an abstract concept by introducing it in three stages with representations in decreasing levels of concreteness.
In the original implementation (concrete-intermediate-abstract), concrete is physical representation, intermediate pictorial representation, and abstract symbolic representation (e.g., mathematical expression).
The new implementation I tested was comic(concrete)-visualization(intermediate)-code(abstract), as you can see in the video below.
A pilot study with 20+ participants with no experience in programming revealed that this implementation is effective enough to teach even recursion, arguably one of the most difficult programming concepts. In the interview, participants (who had no exposure to programming prior to the study) said recursion is easy..! They could even come up with real-life examples.
Although we put the study on hold due to limited resource (i.e., time, money), I’d like to pursue this further to collect more data. (Please reach out if you want to collaborate!)
Cite this work
@inproceedings{suh2019using,
title={Using concreteness fading to model \& design learning process},
author={Suh, Sangho},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research},
pages={353--354},
year={2019}
}