A Tutor System for Teaching Programming in K-12 Education
Virtual tutors, Distance Education, Evasion, k-12 education.
Research shows that the difficulty in initial levels of education, especially mathematics, is one of the main causes for the problem encountered by undergraduate students in computing. The inclusion of these concepts in basic education is vitally important to combat this problem, since it allows young people to have earlier contact with current technologies. For this, the use of distance education systems points out as a viable and cheap alternative, when compared to face-to-face teaching, in addition to increasing the number of places available. Within this concept, there are courses in game programming that, in addition to allowing contact with programming, instigate creativity and cooperation among those involved in development, as well as being attractive and fun to produce. One problem encountered in EaD courses, in addition to dropout rates, is the cost with online tutors. To mitigate this financial impact, the development of virtual tutors appears. These often act as human tutors, analyzing apprentices and directing their studies. In this context, this work seeks to develop an animated virtual tutor, to be applied in a distance teaching platform of game programming, and to investigate its direct and indirect impact on the people involved with the system. For this, a literature review was performed in order to collect data on how tutors systems are developed, and where and how they are applied. Then a prototype of an online tutor in HTML5 was developed to teach digital game programming. Through an initial study, it has been demonstrated that the use of virtual tutors increases the engagement of the learners, due to the sense of support that the tutor causes, making the teaching tool more attractive. From the prototype, a more complete version is being proposed and new experiments will be carried out to evaluate its performance.