An examination of the effects of object-oriented and robotics programming on student achievement, abstraction, problem solving and motivation

This study comparatively examined the effects of object-oriented (comparison) and robotic (experimental) programming on student achievement, abstraction, problem solving, and motivation. The study included 81 tenth-grade students. In the study that adopted embedded experimental research design, data were obtained from two consecutive case studies. The first case in which 41 students took part (20 experimental, 21 comparison), lasted twelve weeks; while the latter involving 40 students (21 experimental, 19 comparison) lasted eight weeks. The participants were administered achievement test regarding computer programming, problem-solving scale, and formal and descriptive abstraction tests before the implementations. Following the implementations, the motivation scale was also applied in addition to these instruments. Qualitative data such as course diaries, problem solving sketches, think aloud and focus group interview records were also used in the study. The programming scores of both comparison and experimental groups increased statistically significantly after the implementations. However, this increase did not differ significantly across the methods. While there was no significant difference within the formal or descriptive abstraction scores of the comparison groups, there was a significant increase found in formal (only in case-2) and descriptive abstraction scores of the experimental groups. In examining the abstraction scores between the methods, a statistically significant difference existed in descriptive abstraction scores in favor of the experimental group only in case-2. There was no statistically significant difference in terms of the problem-solving scores between or within the test groups. Motivation scores of the experimental groups were statistically higher than the comparison groups in both cases.