Teaching Event-driven Programming for Novice Programmers: Challenges and Advances

Many computer applications receive information about external events and produce responses. Such applications include web server software, many services used via Internet browsers, as well as most graphical user interfaces in devices from mobile phones and home appliances to general-purpose computers and industrial applications. The development of such applications is often called event-driven programming (EDP). Despite the continuously increasing importance of event-driven applications in the modern society, only a little published experimental research has been targeted at teaching and learning EDP. This dissertation addresses this research gap. The dissertation has two major parts, of which the first one addresses understanding EDP. As an introduction, it reflects on the difficulty of defining the term event-driven programming and continues by presenting a mapping review regarding published research on teaching and learning EDP. From there, it proceeds to explore students’ perceptions of concepts such as a button, an event, and an event handler. This discussion is based on three studies that involved questionnaires and exercises for students of two online courses. A few questions included reading program code, and in one exercise, the participants were asked to answer using a concept map. The analysis of these answers revealed fundamental misunderstandings regarding EDP and user interfaces. Based on them, the dissertation offers practical suggestions for improving the teaching practice. The second major part of the dissertation addresses teaching EDP from two perspectives. First, it explores contextualization of teaching EDP and focuses on tools and exercises of an approach called media computation. Second, it presents a prototype of a tool that can be used for visualizing high-level concepts in many online learning materials. This tool supports logging users’ actions, plays well together with version control systems, has a relatively low learning curve for teachers of computer science, as well as is open source and free to use. The tool was evaluated in a small-scale pilot study, which demonstrated its suitability for its intended usage environment.