Blended Learning of Programming in the Internet Age

TLDR: A blended learning environment is described, which, in addition to classroom (face-to-face) lessons, introduces lessons delivered over the Internet: the use of multimedia teaching material with completely dynamic interactive simulations, and applications for regular communication on the teaching material between students and lecturers.

Abstract: This paper presents an advanced variant of learning programming by the use of the Internet and multimedia. It describes the development of a blended learning environment, which, in addition to classroom (face-to-face) lessons, introduces lessons delivered over the Internet: the use of multimedia teaching material with completely dynamic interactive simulations; the use of applications for regular checking and self-checking of the acquisition of knowledge; and applications for regular communication on the teaching material between students and lecturers. This blended learning environment has been developed with the purpose of upgrading the basic programming courses (Programming Fundamentals 1 and Programming Fundamentals 2) at the Advanced School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (VISER) in Belgrade, Serbia. The paper contains a brief description of the goals set, their development and implementation (structure design, the development of teaching materials, scenario implementation, and evaluation), and the results of the implementation and evaluation of these courses.