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OCR
38 3 SEEING, HEARING, AND TOUCHING COMPUTER ALGORITHMS... 3.4 The experiment In order to prove empirically the efficiency of the above-presented didactical method, we performed the following experiment. Two 9" grade classes (IX. G and IX. H) were involved in the experiment (with 24 students each) from Bolyai Farkas High School (Targu-Mures, Romania). Both classes started to learn C/ C++ programming language at the beginning of the 2005/2006 school year. The experiment was ran at the end of the first term. The two classes were taught by different teachers but according to the same syllabus. Table 3.1. The averages of the groups before and after the experiment First-term averages Means of the test points G - control group 8.00 4.78 G - experimental group 8.00 6.24 H - control group 7.83 5.26 H - experimental group 7.83 6.30 Source: Kätai, Juhäsz, Adorjäni, 2008 As a preparation of the experiment, we organized a pre-test in order to compare the classes. According to the pre-test results, the average of class H was better than the average of class G by nearly one mark on the 1-10 marking scale, which is used in Romania. Both classes were divided into two “equivalent” groups (an experimental group and a control one) from the beginning of the school year (we verified the equivalence of these groups in both classes). This comparison was made on the basis of the students’ performance during the whole term. As we can see below, the groups could be considered “equivalent” (see Table 3.1). We decided to identify the students with their position in the sorted list of their group. During the two-week experiment, in the experimental groups of each class, the simple algorithms subject was taught according to the above-presented twostep method and syllabus. In the control groups, evidently, the students were taught according to the classic methods, without making any effort to involve the senses in the teaching-learning process. As our main goal was to check whether the two-week application of the method could lead to the deeper understanding of the principles behind the algorithms and a more flexible knowledge, we deliberately made the test quite difficult and unusual. In the followings, we have listed the kind of problems the students of both classes had to solve: — Students received different loop skeletons, and they had to think of such problems whose algorithms have the same loop skeletons (2 points).
