Using smartphones to motivate secondary school students for informatics

Authors:
Jan Holz;Thiemo Leonhardt;Ulrik Schroeder
Affiliations:
RWTH Aachen University, Aachen;RWTH Aachen University, Aachen;RWTH Aachen University, Aachen
Venue:
Proceedings of the 11th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research
Year:
2011

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Abstract

By analyzing and regarding the specific multimedia interests of both sexes, two theses for creating gender-sensitive and active learning environments were developed. They focus on integrating smartphones as interesting everyday objects into computer science courses to raise motivation. In the developed learning environment the students program an Android app in Java to remote control a Lego Mindstorms NXT Robot over Bluetooth by using the smartphones orientation sensor. A second version works with wheeled Arduino microcontrollers instead of NXT, to check whether the smartphone-induced motivation could be transferred to intensified technological topics. The learning environments were evaluated and the results show that using smartphones can have a highly motivational effect on students of both sexes.