CUPI2 COMMUNITY

Promoting a Networking Culture that Supports the Teaching of Computer

Programming

Jorge Villalobos, Nadya Calderón and Camilo Jiménez

Department of Systems Engineering, University of Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

Keywords: Online Community, Computer Programming Education, Teaching Programming Support, Knowledge

Management, Active Learning.

Abstract: Difficulties in computer programming education have prompted the need to tackle the teaching and learning

of programming from alternative pedagogical approaches. However, modern engineering education

demands more than simply working around the students’ learning process. Others who play important roles

in academia face substantial challenges as they support the management of knowledge and the improvement

in teaching within computer science (CS) departments. As a possible solution to these challenges, an

emerging online community culture has applied an effective strategy that can guide people working toward

common goals. To support teachers and CS departments in charge of computer programming education, this

paper presents a social network developed with active learning approaches: the Cupi2 Community, a set of

people, policies, resources, contributions, technological mechanisms, and interaction strategies that promote

the generation of collective knowledge and offer continuous support to CS educators involved with active

learning approaches.

1 INTRODUCTION

Following the guidelines of (ACM, 2001), courses in

computer programming consist of three basic courses

(CS1, CS2, and CS3) in most computer engineering

and computer science (CS) programs. Some of them

(CS1, and usually CS2) are core courses taught in

other engineering programs as well as math and

physics departments. Thus, computer programming

courses typically have a large number of students

with a variety of personal and professional interests

and backgrounds.

Worldwide, difficulties of teaching and learning

in computer programming courses have been a

recurrent topic for the last twenty years. Traditional

strategies in teaching have been primarily focused on

covering programming fundamentals rather than on

generating abilities relevant to graduates for their

myriad professional domains. As a result, the

development of abilities to understand and abstract

problems, analyze abstractions, model solutions, and

build those solutions using technological tools have

have been left aside, expecting that writing many

programs will lead to their development (Woodley,

2007).

We consider that it is important to recognize

separate challenges and difficulties from the

perspective of three actors involved in computer

programming courses: students, teachers, and

institutions, specifically CS departments. First,

students have been the focus of recurrent issues

relating to their frustration and lack of motivation,

reflected in frequent comments such as “I do not feel

like I belonged,” “classes were unfriendly,” or

“classes were boring” (Biggers et al., 2008).

Furthermore, students must learn to program, much

as they learn to write: they need to understand the

intention, receive detailed feedback, and rewrite and

receive more feedback. Instead, traditional

approaches to teach programming confront students

to lectures explaining general algorithms and grad

them by results of programmed functional tests

(Woodley, 2007).

Secondly, teachers, often with different academic

profiles, have typically developed their own personal

strategies, but they must plan classroom lectures and

laboratory practices that fit the approaches adopted in

the CS courses as means for dealing with student

difficulties. In this way, as they must design

complementary learning objects that support these

approaches, they must also develop activities such as

Villalobos J., Calderón N. and Jiménez C. (2009).

CUPI2 COMMUNITY - Promoting a Networking Culture that Supports the Teaching of Computer Programming.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 78-85

DOI: 10.5220/0001977000780085

 SciTePress

planning lectures and designing resources. Such

activities are generally developed individually by

each instructor leaving team discussion as an

informal practice. Moreover, there is a poor culture

around networking practices between teachers as

well as there is a lack of implanted reflection

mechanisms that encourage teachers to share results

of their implemented strategies or practices or to

share their learning objects and materials.

Finally, CS departments are confronted with the

need to manage knowledge generated in

programming courses and support the massive

admissions each semester. For example, in the last

four years at the University of the Andes, CS courses

have comprised 6,798 students distributed in 341

sections, consisting of 35 sections of CS1 and 20

sections of CS2 each semester. These numbers

indicate that about 1,200 students from eight

different programs are enrolled in every class. The

instruction of these courses generally involves more

than 45 different teachers, including graduate

students that practice teaching as part of their

professional training. Hence, knowledge

management has grown extremely complex,

particularly in light of the provisional permanency of

graduate students that instruct CS courses and the

lack of mechanisms to capture their experiences.

Clearly, the problems faced by students, teachers,

departments, and CS education in general require

some creative solutions. Since 2004, the University

of Los Andes has developed a set of methodologies,

resources, and experiences that support the learning

process, called the Cupi2 project

(http://cupi2.uniandes.edu.co). The objective of

Cupi2 is to find new approaches to teaching

computer programming and to support student

learning. The project is currently being applied in

more than 25 higher education institutions in

Colombia. Evaluations of the Cupi2 project,

however, have identified important challenges related

to teachers and CS departments.

This paper presents the Cupi2 Community, an

online social network developed to promote

networking practices among computer programming

teachers and to support relevant processes related to

teaching programming under active methodologies:

the teachers’ adaptation process to the new

methodologies introduced by Cupi2; the process of

planning the instruction of CS courses; the design of

the required learning resources and the process of

supporting the instruction of these courses; and a

structured process of capturing feedback from

teachers’ experiences.

The community provides support, policies, and

tools for each of these processes. The community

also provides mechanisms that enable members of

the CS community to share and reuse learning

resources and to exchange knowledge and

experiences around the teaching of computer

programming. It also empowers departments with the

ability to manage knowledge and to gain experience

and facilitates the tracking and evaluation of

evolutive results.

The general structure of this paper is as follows:

Section 2 provides an overview of specific problems

confronted by students, teachers, and CS departments

within the computer programming teaching and

learning. Section 3 details our solution to challenges

faced by both teachers and CS departments where the

Cupi2 community is depicted as a social networking

culture supporting computer programming teaching.

Section 4 reports the results of three years of

application of the project inside our community, and

Section 5 discusses related work and then concludes.

2 CUPI2. A PEDAGOGICAL

APPROACH TO TEACHING

PROGRAMMING

Evidence on high rates of failure and students dealing

with low motivational issues related to a sense of a

lack of purpose and low grades (Jenkins, 2001)

reveal the need to face programming from alternative

approaches. Although researchers have proposed

various tools and strategies to overcome these

problems (Gearailt, 2002) (BlueJ, 2008) (Robocode,

2008), none of them have identified workable

solutions. We have tried simple and direct solutions

(using different textbooks, teaching alternative

programming languages, reordering subjects,

developing classes in computer labs) but none have

resulted in effective improvements.

The foundation of the Cupi2 project is a

pedagogical model based on four main components

that allow the construction of a balanced solution

(figure 1).

Figure 1: Cupi2 pedagogical model.

First, Active Learning engages students to take on

the main role in their learning process. Thus, teachers

act less as instructors and more as promoters of

CUPI2 COMMUNITY - Promoting a Networking Culture that Supports the Teaching of Computer Programming

activities that ensure the generation of relevant

abilities to analyze problems and model solutions.

Students have to do more than just listen: they must

read, write, discuss, and engage in solving problems.

More importantly, they must be actively involved in

such higher-order thinking tasks as analysis,

synthesis, and evaluation (Bonwell, 1991). Secondly,

they are expected to confront problems developed

from motivational issues through Problem Based

Learning. Such learning requires that students

continually face problems that reflect real world

challenges. In this way, concepts on a subject are

explained through their relation with specific parts of

these problems

The third element in the model is the inclusion of

Incremental Learning, whereby students are able to

generate abilities and acquire knowledge distributed

in several levels. Cupi2 structures 18 levels from the

beginning of CS1 to the end of CS3. The levels allow

the instruction of CS concepts from the fundamentals

to gradually more complex structures. In this way,

students continuously reinforce knowledge and

abilities developed incrementally through each level.

The last component is the Learning by Example

approach, in which students have access to examples

of best practices and common solutions. The Cupi2

project currently provides more than 150 examples to

students.

The basis of the learning evaluation model is the

four components. During each of the 18 levels,

students work around a specific problem (guideline

problem) in which they apply the subject matter of

each level. In each case, students receive an

incomplete application. Depending on the complexity

of the guideline problem, what they receive is more

or less finished. Their goal is to design and develop

the missing parts until they obtain a fully working

application. In addition, students also present a

written test and develop a laboratory practice in

which they use knowledge and abilities that they

have obtained up to that current level. Both a written

test and laboratory practice accompany the guideline

problem.

Experience and results around Cupi2 model have

been exposed in (Villalobos, 2006). The project has

been awarded the 2007 Colombian Informatics

Award by the Association of Colombian Computer

Engineers (ACIS) based on the quality of its learning

objects, the amount of materials built to support the

learning process, and the impact on the academic

environment. The university has tracked the relevant

indicators of success, leading to the

following conclusions:

 The number of students who fail computer

programming courses has declined by 49%.

 Evaluations of computer programming courses

made by students have improved by more than

21%.

 The average grade in computer programming

courses has increased by more than 11%.

2.1 Challenging Teachers

The introduction of active approaches in Cupi2

model has generated different necessities to the other

actors involved in the learning experience. Teachers

require the planning of their lectures and laboratories

using different learning resources and fostering

collaboration with fellow teachers. Thus, the Cupi2

approach has answered these challenges by designing

learning sequences.

A learning sequence (figure 2) is an ordered set

of activities followed to achieve specific learning

objectives of a subject. In Cupi2, a sequence is

designed after the objectives of a specific level and it

uses the level’s guideline problem. This sequence

helps the teacher to structure several classroom

lectures and labs with activities and working

materials related to each of the activities. It also

motivates teachers to keep records of its own

experiences on designed activities.

Figure 2: Learning Sequence Model.

In order to provide feedback opportunities and

generate an active climate to students, teachers plan

learning sequences composing activities of different

kind such as: classroom activities, extraclass

activities, collaborative, individual, laboratory

practices and homework asignments. Each of these

activities is supported with an appropriate set of

learning resources.

Many important advantages arise from facing the

instruction of subjects as structured sequences. First,

teachers always keep the learning objectives of the

level in mind while preparing their classes. Secondly,

they can always perform self-evaluation of

experiences obtained from their designed activities.

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

The result is a continuous contribution to self-

improvement and experience that they can share with

other teachers, improving their overall practice.

Thirdly, since teachers are free to design or reuse

their own set of activities and learning resources,

learning sequences reflect personal strategies.

Finally, the time invested in planning classes and

building resources is incrementally reduced as

teachers reuse learning objects and sequences of their

own or other teachers.

2.2. Teaching Improvement and

Knowledge Management in CS

Departments

Regardless of how effective new approaches to

teaching may be, university administration must take

steps to establish a suitable climate for change before

significant change can take place (Rugarcia, 2000).

The heterogeneous nature of personal profiles and

personal strategies and the short-term permanency in

departments of some instructors calls for more

permanent support.

CS departments must ensure their mature growth

as well as offer the required support to their faculties.

Hence, departments (as organizations) must develop

abilities and strategies to generate, manage, reinforce,

and transfer collective knowledge among its faculty

members since they represent the main conduit of

learning in their departments. When faculty members

coordinate actions effectively, they enable and

promote knowledge transfer inside their institutions

not only to students but to the organization itself

(Espejo et al., 1996).

Characteristics behind online community work

appear as an adaptable, affordable, and innovative

proposal to tackle issues around teachers’ adaptation

and knowledge management. A proper community

culture guided by clear policies allows members’

interaction, provides feedback mechanisms, and

ensures the collection of contributions from its

members. In a teaching environment, this community

culture offers advantages to ensure permanent

support and knowledge appropriation to teachers.

3 THE CUPI2 COMMUNITY

While an online community can be understood and

viewed from a number of diverse perspectives (e.g.,

sociology, technology, e-commerce, and so forth),

those who have been guided by practice and

experience have identified four principal elements of

an online community: 1) individuals who interact, 2)

a shared purpose, 3) policies as protocols or rules that

guide interaction among these individuals, and 4)

computer systems that support and mediate

interaction (Preece, 2006).

The Cupi2 online community promotes a culture

of networking and social interaction between

computer programming teachers challenged with new

methodologies to instruct their subjects. A set of

policies have been established to guide the members

work and a robust technological infrastructure has

been developed.

Figure 3: Cupi2 Community Structure.

Figure 3 shows the structure of the individuals,

the policies (as teaching processes), the technological

platform, and the resources inside the Cupi2 online

community. Teachers interact with processes to get

them involved with active approaches and to

contribute feedback from their experiences. In this

way, instructors find processes of mentoring or an

introduction to the community in which the basics

about rules, platform, systems, and navigation are

discussed. It also includes a process that assists with

plans for the instruction of their courses. In

particular, teachers can find strategies, resources, and

tools related to the design of learning sequences for

the different levels in their courses. Finally, it

outlines a process that guides teachers on how to

contribute feedback and reflection of their

experiences. The technological platform supporting

our community provides mechanisms of interaction

among members, search engines for resources,

learning sequence editors, and statistics reporting.

3.1 Members of the Community

Members of the Cupi2 Community are computer

programming teachers from different CS departments

in higher education institutions around Colombia. All

members have included active Cupi2 approaches in

their curricula; therefore, challenges from interactive

learning approaches have become a main subject in

their departments. Even though the community

CUPI2 COMMUNITY - Promoting a Networking Culture that Supports the Teaching of Computer Programming

provides support for diverse teaching processes,

teachers are invited to participate in the community

without being forced to follow any of them. They are

able to participate in any process according to their

specific needs as well as interact directly with other

services provided independently. A team of systems’

administrators and moderators ensure proper service

to participants in the Cupi2 community.

3.2 Community Resources and

Contributions

In our teaching environment community, knowledge

is represented as a set of resources and experiences

contributed by members on the network. The

collection and storing of these resources in a

structured fashion enables the community to grow

and mature. Stored resources are available to search,

reuse, and evaluate continually. Inside the Cupi2

community, these resources and working materials

have been categorized according to the function they

support and the types of standard elements.

Accordingly, we built repositories containing

resources on three main categories: Learning objects

and working resources, portfolios of teachers’

experiences and finally statistical information and

tracking indicators.

The statistical information repository stores

relevant information that can be used to assess the

impact and evolution of the project. Similarly, the

portfolios’ repository keeps records of how teachers

are planning the instruction of courses and

information about successful and unsuccessful

practices or strategies encountered on their

experience. Thus, the repository serves as a resource

where teachers share learning sequences and

feedback documents.

When designing learning sequences, teachers

produce and/or reuse two types of resources:

activities and learning objects. The activities

designed to be executed in the classroom contain

exercises, working sheets or videos as

complementary resources. Teachers can add extra

assignments that students can work on during extra-

class time. These assignments contain interactive

learning objects that provide students with feedback

while they interact with them. Laboratory practices

are supported by case studies, tutorials, demos and

more interactive learning objects.

The repository of learning objects contains all

these resources that support activities. The resources

are classified by the kind of work they support.

Hence, teachers can find and contribute 1)

worksheets, 2) laboratory exercises, 3) interactive

learning objects, 4) audiovisual presentations, 5)

videos and animation, 6) mind maps with concepts of

the courses, 7) tutorials, and 8) exams.

For instance, during 2008-II, one of the member

teachers planned to introduce OO concepts and Java

during five classroom lectures, two laboratory

practices, and two exam sessions (one to be

developed in a laboratory and a written one).

During the first and second class sessions,

students were assigned a set of individual and peer

activities with worksheets in a case study of an

application to manage employees’ information. The

students had to complete the assignments between

sessions. After the two classes, students attended a

laboratory session in which the teacher planned an

exercise that required students to interact with

Eclipse IDE, supported by a set of available tutorials.

During the next two lectures, the teacher also planned

to present some slides and proposed a group

discussion. He attached a short video to this activity,

presenting differences between the OO concepts of

object and class. During the second laboratory,

students had to implement extensions to the

employees’ application in order to practice what they

had studied during the class. In the last class session,

the teacher proposed working on a summary asking

students to review mind maps of these subjects.

Finally, the teacher evaluated the progress of the

students by administering two exams. Some of these

activities were found in other teachers’ sequences,

available for others to reuse. At the end of the

instruction, the teacher reported results on the

statistical repository. He also evaluated his own

experience and shared the results by writing reports

of each activity.

3.3 Governance

As online behavior must be regulated, we defined a

set of policies that would guide user interactions and

enable a structured navigation across our community.

These policies were formulated as: 1) a set of

structured processes that guide what members should

do during different stages of the instruction process

in their courses and 2) a set of rules that

regulate communication and members’ interaction.

Main access to the community is provided

through a web portal (http://cupi2.uniandes.edu.co)

composed by sections with different permission

levels (public, registered teachers, students, and

moderators). The first interaction with the Cupi2

community takes place in a section in which non-

registered members can consult online public

content. However, to join the community, individuals

must register. Once they have registered and their

academic affiliation has been verified, members can

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

access and contribute different resources described

above.

3.4 Technological Platform

The Cupi2 community platform is a set of web-based

systems, developed to provide services related with

learning design, resource management, member

interactions, and statistical data collection. All the

applications are integrated and supplemented

continually so that they support the needs of the

different processes. New functional requirements are

continuously developed to enhance current services

or to include new ones. During the past four years,

complete platform systems have been designed and

developed at the University of the Andes.

Systems supporting the community include the

following: 1) a virtual working space manager in

which teachers can structure documents and

resources with a specific purpose and scope. For

example, a virtual space is built with documents

related to a complete course while a second is

dedicated to a session or even a specific subject. 2) A

resource search engine for locating documents and

resources of different types. The search allows

several criteria to filter results. The engine includes

searching over already designed learning sequences.

3) A Mind Maps navigator: a special resources

navigator that allows one to search XML structured

mind maps describing CS1, CS2, and CS3 concepts.

In order to support the design of learning

sequences, systems also include: 4) the learning

sequences editor. This editor provides services that

assist the structuring of activities and resources.

Figure 4 illustrates the system used to structure

activities for several classroom lectures (N7 C1 to N7

C4) and laboratory sessions (N7 L1 and L2) on a

CS2 course. The sequence is designed to help

teachers meet their objectives on subjects of sorting,

searching, and automatic testing. Since teachers must

describe activities and attach supporting resources,

the editor is connected to the resource search engine.

The platform also includes 5) forums as our

interaction system. Teachers post comments, general

questions and suggestions in structured forums

available in the community site; and 6) a statistics

reporter that keep track of the metrics registered by

teachers during the instruction of their courses over

the years.

Finally, the system provides a set of

administrative tools that support administrators and

moderators of the community. These tools appear in

tasks such as the assignment of assistants to courses

or the update process of news displayed online.

Figure 4: Resources search engine in the learning

sequences editor system.

4 METRICS OF A GROWING

COMMUNITY

Last three years of community experience have

shown that the Cupi2 Community has been growing

and improving. To highlight the growth of the

structural elements of the project and their impact,

we will describe relevant metrics tracked on five

categories until November 2008. First, we show the

size of the community in terms of the number of

current members and the total number of teachers

and students that have become involved since 2005

(Table 1); second, we show the size of the

community measured in learning resources, which

are the result of contributions made by teachers and

in-house developments (Table 2).

Table 1: Size of the community (membership).

Total number of universities joined 30

Currently active members 157

Total teachers involved since 2005 198

Students involved with Cupi2 since 2005 6,798

Table 2: Size of the community (learning resources from

teachers’ contributions and development).

Examples 78

Laboratory exercises 106

Working sheets 821

Tutorials 15

Videos , animation and demos 172

Interactive learning Objects 33

Mind Maps 108

Exams (written tests and laboratories) 2,959

Data structures 52

CUPI2 COMMUNITY - Promoting a Networking Culture that Supports the Teaching of Computer Programming

Next, we measure the size of the community in

terms of software development. Almost a half million

LOC’s and more than a thousand documents have

been developed to provide examples, interactive

learning tools, exercises, tutorials, and support tools

for both students and teachers (Table 3). After that,

we show the size of the community in terms of

experience records and teaching portfolios (Table 4).

After the instruction of 341 sections of CS courses,

the community was able to offer almost a thousand

records of experiences and a wide set of learning

sequences that are now used as a guide for new

members in the community. Finally, we describe

community access in numbers (Table 5). Since most

of the member universities are located in Colombia

and the resources and Cupi2 portal are currently in

Spanish, we determined the impact of the community

on this set of members.

Table 3: Software metrics of resources developed in our

university.

Examples, laboratory exercises and interactive

learning objects LOCs.

321,036

Examples, laboratory exercises and interactive

learning objects: Test LOCs.

82,963

Public documents describing examples,

exercises, functional requirements, and UML

models from developed resources.

1,138

Developers’ support tools 10

Table 4: Size of the community (experience records and

teaching portfolios).

Number of learning sequences contributed by

teachers.

434

Teachers’ documents of experiences. 974

Table 5: Community impact and use. Statistical visits to the

Cupi2 portal during 2008.

Country Average monthly

visits in 2008

Total reported

visits for 2008

Colombia 16577 156884

Spain 1302 13154

USA 685 6695

Others 167 4364

5 RELATED WORK

Several online social networks have appeared in

recent teaching environments, both from academia

and the private sector. In academia, we can find the

Curriculum Access System for Elementary Science

(CASES). This system is an online environment

designed to support new elementary science teachers

as they learn to teach inquiry-oriented science

effectively (Davis, 2004). CASES is based on three

principles: First, teachers must reflect on their

teaching; second they must use instructional

resources; and finally, they must interact in a

supportive community grounded in the study of

practice. In this way, elements that support these

principles such as inquiry-oriented unit plans, online

teacher journals, and online discussion spaces are

incorporated in an online learning environment.

Together with other resources, each of these elements

are also present in the Cupi2 Community. In this

case, each one is designed according to the Cupi2

pedagogical model, not the inquiry science pedagogy

model suggested in CASES.

Another social network in the teaching

environment is described in Hmelo-Silver et al.

(2005), which presents the Elementary and

Secondary Education Project (eSTEP). This project is

a problem-based learning online environment for

teacher education grounded in three critical elements:

A learning sciences conceptual model, a learning

planning/design component, and a connection

between the first two elements. Thus, the eSTEP

system provides video cases of classroom practice,

online learning science hypertext, and a collaborative

problem-based whiteboard. This whiteboard is the

central learning tool in the environment and

represents the focus of negotiation in face-to-face

problem-based learning in eSTEP. Just as the

whiteboard supports the teacher learning process,

learning sequences, interactive learning objects, and

examples support teacher education in Cupi2

Community. Each of these elements is complemented

by processes and tools that follow and guide the

members of our community through not only their

individual learning process but also the teaching

process.

Several online networks for teaching

environments are also found in the private field.

These networks often focus on social elements of a

community such as sharing and connecting rather

than directly supporting the process of learning how

to teach. An example of such an online network is the

TeachingToday website (TeachingToday, 2008). As

the developers of the website are aware that online

communities provide a wealth of opportunities for

educators to share teaching strategies, ideas, and best

practices, they developed an online warehouse of free

tips, tools, and resources that are easy-to-use and

pedagogically sound. These elements can also be

found in the National Geographic Education Network

(NatGeo, 2008). This community includes

information about professional development

opportunities such as workshops and online events

that members can attend. One of the most promising

online networks developed by the private sector is

Yahoo Teachers (Yahoo Teachers, 2008). This

network, designed by and for teachers, provides a

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

venue in which teachers from all fields can create,

modify, and share standards-based curricula.

6 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, we have described the main results of

the Cupi2 project after four years of innovation in

teaching programming. We have exposed the needs

of teachers and CS departments taking part in the

active methodologies of Cupi2. For this reason, we

have built and presented the Cupi2 online

community. The community promotes a networking

culture among teachers that allows the generation and

appropriation of collective knowledge and at the

same time provides effective support strategies to all

its members. This work provides evidence that Cupi2

has led to relevant changes in departments, reflected

by less invested in teacher planning and effective

introductory faculty programs. The most relevant

impact metrics and growing numbers have been

presented as evidence of the work supported by the

Cupi2 community and its importance to computer

programming teachers. We are continually designing

plans to reach more universities in Colombia and

developing exercises, examples, tutorials, and

services inside our technological platform.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Authors would like to thank contributions made

by teachers working on project Cupi2 especially to

Milena Vela. We would also like to thank the team of

graduate students who supported our work as well as

to Diego Leal from CIFE.

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CUPI2 COMMUNITY - Promoting a Networking Culture that Supports the Teaching of Computer Programming