On the Importance of Live Programming and Short Feedback Loops for Educational Robotics

Live programming is usually considered beneficial for learners partly because it reduces the cost of experimentation, facilitating exploratory programming. In the past few decades, there has been a steady increase in the interest and subsequent adoption of visual programming environments and robotics kits specifically tailored for beginners. These tools, however, often lack live programming capabilities. To measure the impact of live programming and shorter feedback loops on educational robotics, we conducted a pilot study with high-school students using our own programming environment: Physical Bits. We developed two distinct configurations of the environment: one with live programming, monitoring, and debugging capabilities enabled and another with those features disabled. We used these two configurations to compare the performance of students during an introductory workshop on robotics. Our findings are consistent with similar studies on the matter: live programming can help students progress further, improve their efficiency, reduce the time required to solve each task, and increase the frequency in which the programs are tested on the robots.