Resumen de MoCAS: A Mobile Collaborative Tool for Learning Scopeof Identifiers in Programming Courses

Luis Miguel Serrano Cámara, Maximiliano Paredes Velasco , Jesús Angel Velázquez Iturbide , Carlos María Alcover de la Hera , Mª Eugenia Castellanos

• This article presents an instructional framework for collaborative learning, called CIF and aimed at the analysis level ofBloom’s taxonomy, as well as a mobile collaborative tool called MoCAS that supports CIF. MoCAS is aimed at thedomain of scope of identifiers in programming learning, which is a topic present in programming courses in engineeringstudies. The specification and development of MoCAS were explicitly driven by pedagogical goals and by the atomicactions declared in CIF as simple items of collaborative activities. Furthermore, CIF and MoCAS were evaluated in anactual educational context with respect to students’ performance and motivation. Students using CIF and MoCASobtained statistically significant higher grades than students studying in an individual or collaborative basis but not usingMoCAS. In addition, we measured statistically significant measures indicating that students instructed with CIF andMoCAS were more motivated than students instructed collaboratively but not using CIF or MoCAS. In addition to CIFand MoCAS,and the evaluation results, the experienceshere reported exemplifyseveralsoftware engineeringpractices: thedesign of an educational system based on knowledge of the target domain (namely, Bloom’s taxonomy) and the evaluationof users’ satisfaction (mainly, students’ motivation).