Understanding College Level Student Learning of Basic Programming at an Open Access Institution Cindy Robertson ∗ Georgia Gwinnett College Lawrenceville, Georgia, USA crobertson2@ggc.edu Anca Doloc-Mihu ∗ Georgia Gwinnett College Lawrenceville, Georgia, USA adolocmihu@ggc.edu ABSTRACT In this study, we present our fndings with regard to teaching basic programming concepts at an Open Access Institution. The goal was to gather insight into how to best introduce programming to our students. We found that our students should start with block coding, as a means to slowly and easily introduce coding concepts. Then they are ready for text-based programming skills. This fow allows them to understand and be able to apply basic computing concepts and enjoy the process of learning. Also, introducing block coding should be done via a fun game or activity to entice them to want to learn programming. CCS CONCEPTS · Applied computing → Interactive learning environments. KEYWORDS Project-based Learning, Teaching, Assessment, Block Coding, Critical Thinking, CS, Education, IT, Outreach, Programming, Online, Gamifcation ACM Reference Format: Cindy Robertson and Anca Doloc-Mihu. 2023. Understanding College Level Student Learning of Basic Programming at an Open Access Institution. In 2023 ACM Southeast Conference (ACMSE 2023), April 12ś14, 2023, Virtual Event, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/ 3564746.3587007 1 INTRODUCTION In today’s world, run by computer technology, there is a push to teach all children basic computing programming skills. Many educators believe that coding skills should be required learning like science and math [6]. For example, the founders of Code.org believe that "computing is so fundamental to understanding and participating in society that it is valuable for every student to learn as part of a modern education" [2]. Many programs have been developed to help teach young students to code because research has found that students can easily learn new languages up to the ∗ Both authors contributed equally to this research. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. ACMSE 2023, April 12ś14, 2023, Virtual Event, USA © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9921-0/23/04. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3564746.3587007 age of 18, but to achieve profciency similar to a native speaker, they should start learning a language by the age of 10 [11]. Coding is not always an easy skill to learn. Students have dif- fculty understanding the logic and operation of algorithms. Re- searchers have studied tools to focus on diferent types of learning such as visual learning, gamifcation, and learning by doing, among others [9]. Block coding has become a popular way to introduce coding to children because it can "improve learnability for novices by favoring recognition over recall and reduce cognitive load by chunking computational patterns into blocks" [1]. In one study comparing students learning to code in block-based and text-based programming environments, the block condition showed greater learning gains and a higher level of interest in future computing courses [13]. In another study, students reported that block coding was easy to learn because of the natural language description of the blocks, the drag-and-drop ability of the blocks, and how easy it was to look through all of the coding blocks of the language [12]. Our experience at an open-access institution has been challeng- ing. Many students are not ready to take traditional text-based programming classes and often have to repeat our introductory programming course several times. This is not a unique phenom- enon. McCracken et al. reported disappointing results suggesting that many students do not know how to program after their in- troductory programming courses [5]. Our study was conducted in our general education introductory computing classes designed to teach basic computing topics such as hardware, software, security and networking and introduce students to productivity and digital media software. These courses are taken before any programming classes. This study was based on our previous work [10] where we conducted outreach workshops to test the efectiveness of online coding workshops and evaluated student perception of learning. Our previous study, as well as others, have shown that students have negative misconceptions about programming and can be en- couraged to learn using simple workshops both in-person [14] and online [3]. Our previous studies also showed that learning can occur online or in person if computing concepts are introduced with an engaging activity like learning to program a game [3, 10]. In this study, we expand on our previous studies to see if we can gain any insight into which modalities could improve how we introduce programming to our students. 2 METHODOLOGY This study was motivated by the Technology Ambassadors Program (TAP), which is an outreach program at our institution aiming to address the need to increase the number of students who persist in an IT or IT-related major, particularly those underrepresented in ACM Southeast Conference – ACMSE 2023 – Session 1: Full Papers – ISBN: 978-1-4503-9921-0 Virtual Event, USA, April 12-14, 2023 26