Using Design Sketch to Teach Bubble Sort in High School

TL;DR

This study explores using visual design sketches as a teaching tool to improve high school students' understanding of Bubble Sort, especially for abstract concepts, through an experimental approach.

Contribution

It introduces a novel pedagogical method using Design Sketches to enhance comprehension of Bubble Sort in high school education.

Findings

Design Sketch significantly improves understanding of high-level concepts like iteration number.

It has limited impact on low-level concepts such as compare and swap.

The approach is effective for teaching abstract algorithmic ideas.

Abstract

Bubble Sort is simple. Yet, it seems a bit difficult for high school students. This paper presents a pedagogical methodology: Using Design Sketch to visualize the concepts in Bubble Sort, and to evaluate how this approach assists students to understand the pseudo code of Bubble Sort. An experiment is conducted in Wu-Ling Senior High School with 250 students taking part. The statistical analysis of experimental results shows that, for relatively high abstraction concepts, such as iteration number, Design Sketch helps significantly. However, it is not so for low abstraction concepts such as compare, swap, and iteration.