Presented at the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges: Southwest in Irvine, California and published in the Journal for Computing Sciences in Colleges.

This presentation is accessible at learnbyfailure.com/Codevid and its source is available on GitHub.

• Increasing demand for online learning
  • Covid-19 Pandemic “Zoom University”
  • Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)
  • Online degrees
• Challenges teaching coding online
  • Trade-offs between live coding, illustrations, gestures/emotions, etc.

• Evidence-based Principles of Multimedia and e-Learning

• Amount of demand on brain’s working memory
• Distributing presentation across multiple modes of communication decreases cognitive load (Mousavi et al.-1995)
• Multimedia and e-Learning Principles (Clark & Mayer):
  • Multimedia Principle: {text + graphics} > {text}
  • Signaling Principle: signal most important information to pay attention to
  • Contiguity Principle: related information should be presented in close spatial and temporal proximity
  • Modality Principle: {audio + graphics} > {text + graphics}
• Students tend to reflect positive emotions witnessed from instructor (Lawson and Mayer-2022)

• Screen share
• Camera share
  • Picture-in-picture
  

• Transparent markerboard with video camera
  • Flipped image for natural writing/drawing

• HEERF funding for educational resiliency
  • Integrating lightboard with IDE screen sharing

• As part of Codewit.us usability study
• Computer Science student participants (n=10)
  • CS1 passed, enrolled in CS2
• Protocol
  • Interview on experience/attitudes on CS1 homework/reading material
  • Intervention: tutorial on recursion
    • Randomly assigned intervention: picture-in-picture (n=5) or CodeVid Studio (n=5)
    • Independent programming challenge on recursion
  • Debrief: attitudes and feedback on experience

• “The video feature was helpful.” (1 strongly disagree to 5 strongly agree)
  • CodeVid Studio: M=5, s.d.=0
  • Picture-in-Picture: M=4.8, s.d.=0.2
• “What did you like least about the website”
  • CodeVid Studio: (nothing video-related)
  • Picture-in-Picture: the video would be better with visuals/graphics to illustrate the topic

• Novel presentation of text + graphics + presenter for teaching coding skills
  • Theoretical advantages based on evidence-based principles
• Pilot videos integrated into Codewit.us beta release
• Positive formative feedback from usability study

Future Work

• Experimental study of cognitive load and learning effectiveness
• Platforming perspectives from historically marginalized groups, relating coding to their lives
  • “Coding Community” supported by California Office of Planning and Research, Learning Labs

The full paper is available online via ACM Digital Library

To cite this paper, use the following reference in your bibliography:

Kevin Buffardi. 2023. CodeVid Studio: Coding Videos with Multimodal Instruction. J. Comput. Sci. Coll. 38, 10 (April 2023), 26–34.

Or import the following BibTeX reference:

@article{buffardi2023codevid,
author = {Buffardi, Kevin},
title = {CodeVid Studio: Coding Videos with Multimodal Instruction},
year = {2023}, issue_date = {April 2023},
publisher = {Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges},
address = {Evansville, IN, USA},
volume = {38}, number = {10}, issn = {1937-4771},
month = {jun}, pages = {26–34}, numpages = {9}
}