An Event Listener or an Event Handler? Students Explain Event-drivenness in JavaScript

Aleksi Lukkarinen; Teemu Lehtinen; Lassi Haaranen; Lauri Malmi

doi:10.1145/3488042.3488051

An Event Listener or an Event Handler? Students Explain Event-drivenness in JavaScript

Aleksi Lukkarinen^*, Teemu Lehtinen, Lassi Haaranen, Lauri Malmi

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › Scientific › peer-review

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Abstract

When students in programming courses are taught event-driven programming (EDP) for the first time, they face new terminology and concepts that they should internalize. Moreover, they learn a fully new approach for reasoning about program logic and execution order. However, there is a lack of research in students’ understanding of these concepts. In this paper, we describe a study, in which we asked web development students to explain their conception of EDP: what are the main concepts involved and how they interact. Moreover, we asked them to explain the execution of a short piece of JavaScript code that focuses on basic usage of events and event listeners. The answers, which we requested as concept maps and text, were analyzed using inductive content analysis. Our results clearly demonstrate shortcomings in the students’ learning and illustrate various misunderstandings that they may have regarding EDP. Based on the findings, we give suggestions for improving the teaching of EDP.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Proceedings of 21st Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research, Koli Calling 2021
Editors	Otto Seppälä, Andrew Petersen
Publisher	ACM
Pages	1-10
Number of pages	10
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450384889
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3488042.3488051
Publication status	Published - 17 Nov 2021
MoE publication type	A4 Article in a conference publication
Event	Koli Calling - International Conference on Computing Education Research - Online, Lieksa, Finland Duration: 18 Nov 2021 → 21 Nov 2021 Conference number: 21 https://www.kolicalling.fi/

Conference

Conference	Koli Calling - International Conference on Computing Education Research
Abbreviated title	Koli Calling
Country/Territory	Finland
City	Lieksa
Period	18/11/2021 → 21/11/2021
Internet address	https://www.kolicalling.fi/

Keywords

event-oriented
event-based
JavaScript
concept map
computer science education
programming education

Access to Document

10.1145/3488042.3488051

Final Accepted ManuscriptAccepted author manuscript, 449 KB

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3488042.3488051

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title = "An Event Listener or an Event Handler? Students Explain Event-drivenness in JavaScript",

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Lukkarinen, A , Lehtinen, T , Haaranen, L & Malmi, L 2021, An Event Listener or an Event Handler? Students Explain Event-drivenness in JavaScript. in O Seppälä & A Petersen (eds), Proceedings of 21st Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research, Koli Calling 2021., 23, ACM, pp. 1-10, Koli Calling - International Conference on Computing Education Research, Lieksa, Finland, 18/11/2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3488042.3488051

An Event Listener or an Event Handler? Students Explain Event-drivenness in JavaScript. / Lukkarinen, Aleksi ; Lehtinen, Teemu ; Haaranen, Lassi et al.

Proceedings of 21st Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research, Koli Calling 2021. ed. / Otto Seppälä; Andrew Petersen. ACM, 2021. p. 1-10 23.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › Scientific › peer-review

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An Event Listener or an Event Handler? Students Explain Event-drivenness in JavaScript

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