Performance and Use Evaluation of an Electronic Book for Introductory Python Programming

Abstract

Electronic books (ebooks) provide the opportunity to go beyond
\nthe limitations of a physical page. These opportunities
\nare particularly important for computing education,
\nwhere dynamic information is a key characteristic of our domain.
\nAn electronic book can provide opportunities to program
\nor conduct analyses that are impossible on the physical
\npage, integrating instructional information with creative
\nexploration. However, just because ebooks provide these
\nopportunities does not mean that we know how students
\nwill actually use ebooks in the context of a class. Miller
\nand Ranum have produced an electronic book for teaching
\nintroductory computing in Python. We explored how students
\nused the dynamic and novel features of the book, and
\ncorrelated that use with performance on learning measures.
\nWe found that students made extensive use of the traditional
\nprogramming environment in the book, but that the lesser-used
\nvisualization tool was better correlated with student
\nperformance. In addition, we found that although students
\nreported high levels of satisfaction with the book, they appeared
\nto use it much like a traditional textbook, making
\nless use of many of the interactive features of the book than
\nwe expected.