Impact of student’s programming experience on cognitive skills: towards a gamified multimedia learning approach / Mahfudzah Othman ... [et al.]

This study investigated the impact of students’ programming experience on their cognitive skills, thus proposing a gamified multimedia learning model to provide a meaningful programming experience to novice programmers. To achieve this, ninety-seven students from the first semester of the Diploma in Computer Science, Universiti Teknologi MARA Perlis Branch, Malaysia, have taken part in the Group Assessment Logical Thinking Test (GALT). The objective is to investigate the number of high logical thinkers (HLT) and low logical thinkers (LLT) and whether their programming experience correlates with their cognitive skills or not. Further analysis was conducted to predict whether exposure to programming experience, in the long run, will positively influence their cognitive skills. Descriptive analysis has shown that the number of LLT is higher than HLT at 54.6%, and Spearman Rho’s correlation analysis has shown a moderate positive correlation between programming experience and logical thinking skill at 0.654, a significant value of p < 0.05. Linear regression analysis also has shown that exposure to programming experience will positively affect students’ logical thinking skills at 0.172, a significant value of p < 0.05. From the study, a gamified multimedia learning model for novice programmers is proposed, with integration between problem-oriented instructional strategies, segmenting principle of multimedia learning, and gamification with assessment and rules or goals as game attributes that involve points or badges, and levels of progress bars as the game elements.