Enhance Students’ Motivation to Learn Programming through Projects

Abstract

This article presents the results of a pedagogical experiment when teaching microcontroller programming. The pedagogical experiment was conducted at the Faculty of Information Technology of the L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University in the form of project-based seminars on the Arduino platform (2017-2020). The experiment was attended by 88 first-year IT students. Our goal in this study is to verify the proposed hypothesis on the use of the project-based learning method in teaching microcontroller programming. In the process of conducting a pedagogical experiment, we divided our students into 2 groups: control and experimental. The training of both groups was carried out according to one curriculum, but using different methods. In the control group, traditional teaching methods and learning tools were used, and in the experimental group, we used the technology of project-based learning. As assessment criteria, we took the test tasks “pre-test” and “post-test” that we developed and conducted a survey for the control and experimental groups. We used statistical methods to confirm or refute the proposed hypothesis of our research, that is, at the end of the pedagogical experiment to get an informed decision about the difference and coincidence of the obtained data.