A web-based programming learning environment to support cognitive development

Web-based programming has become a popular and vital issue in recent years. The rapid growth of various applications not only demonstrates the importance of web-based programming, but also reveals the difficulty of training relevant skills. The difficulty is owing to the lack of facilities such as online coding, debugging and peer help to assist the students in promoting their cognitive development in web-based programming. To cope with these problems, in this paper, a web-based programming assisted system, ‘‘WPAS”, is proposed, which is able to support five programming activities with various difficulty levels of cognition based on Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy. WPAS provides online coding, debugging and annotation tools to conduct the training and peer assessment for web-based programming. Experimental results of 47 undergraduate students show that the innovative approach is helpful to the students in improving their cognitive development in Web-based programming. In addition, according to the results of the questionnaire, most of the participants perceived the ease of use and usefulness of the proposed system. Therefore, this study suggests that teachers could design Web-based programming activities supported by the WPAS system to improve students’ cognitive development in web-based programming. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.