PhD. 2006. Major professor: Diane McGrath.
E-mail: unknown

Abstract:
   This dissertation is a case study of class that used Lego ® Mindstorms(TM) robots to facilitate learning the computer language Java. The class participants were elementary and middle school, in-service teachers. The class was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation/Research Experience for Teachers program. The study was prompted by the lack of research on teaching computer programming. Since computer programming is vital to science and industry, this lack of study of the pedagogy of computer programming is troubling. If methods to improve introductory computer programming classes could be found, the impact on students would be large.
   The researcher on this project has almost 30 years of computer programming experience. During that time, he has observed that computer programming is a skill that is best taught in the context of accomplishing a goal that the student programmer wants to achieve. Current practice in most computer programming classes decontextualize the subject and provide little intrinsic motivation for the students. The current research hypothesizes that programming a robot to perform certain tasks, especially in the context of competition between students, i.e. playing a game, will motivate the students to want to learn to program. This intrinsic motivation will help keep the students on task during the learning process.
   There are two major assertions from this study. First, the robots did help the students learn to program in Java. Second, building self-confidence in the students is critical to having them become independent programmers. Additional findings are that building a community of student programmers encourages the formation of the needed self-confidence and that the students found that using the robots made programming fun.