Grasp & Jupyter notebook

Initial situation

Basic programming concepts (variables, conditions, loops, functions, lists) are taught in many university courses and even become core competencies in pre-college studies. Moreover, these concepts are often prerequisites for more advanced courses related to digital skills. Thus, basic programming skills are becoming more and more important and form a foundation for many courses in all faculties. Learning them, however, is often considered tedious and scary.

The pedagogical project, designed to change this perception, concerns the “Information Technology in ESF” and “Programming I in SF” courses taught in Bachelor and Master programs at the University of Neuchâtel. The pedagogical principle is to propose practical work to non-informaticians (mathematicians, biologists, etc.) to introduce them to programming in the Python language. The goal of the project is to open computer science as an indispensable interdisciplinary tool and to find another approach to teaching computer science to non-computer scientists.

A big challenge in many digital skills courses is the heterogeneous level of students which forces teachers to review the basics at the expense of more advanced content.

Project implementation

Within the framework of the project, students can independently learn and review programming concepts through short video clips on the concepts, additional interactive resources to deepen these concepts (according to their level and needs) as well as self-assessed exercises.

These 3 types of teaching materials are developed with digital tools offering a new pedagogical approach and whose use is becoming widespread in the academic world. Graasp allows to develop different modules with interactive slides and is used to design self-correcting exercises for basic Python teaching. Jupyter notebook is convenient for creating and sharing files related to the computational domain. Replit is used for online development and allows to propose work in a multi-language and multi-user environment.

Concretely, the project aims to produce 4 video capsules that can be used:

in core courses to allow students to watch the theory videos before coming to class, thus allowing them to better focus on active learning in class.

as an optional self-study for students taking a course with a prerequisite.

as an outreach tool, by sharing them with other institutions as, for example, computer science becomes a mandatory discipline in pre-university studies. Moreover, the UNINE is starting to train teachers in this discipline: this creates a demand for quality materials to help them give a solid foundation to future university students.

Thoughts and advice

In building a base of teaching materials, it is necessary to find different topics for different learners’ backgrounds. Thus, the examples used for mathematicians should not be the same as those for biologists. The choice should be directed towards concrete examples and targeted problems and not generic topics.

The capsules last between 3 and 5 minutes. It should be noted that videos complement, but do not replace, active face-to-face learning.

The interactive slides should contain an interface with live coding and presentation of results. Nevertheless, it should be considered that self-administered exercises do not replace face-to-face lectures, but are a complementary support and allow students to progress at their own pace when learning independently or reviewing for exams.

It is also beneficial to add a gamification aspect to self-assessment exercises to motivate students to persevere (see De Santo et al. 2022).