Improving Concept Learning Through Specialized Digital Fanzines

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel approach using specialized digital fanzines to enhance concept learning in undergraduate programming courses by dynamically adapting content to student needs.

Contribution

It introduces an agile procedure for creating and utilizing digital fanzines tailored to problematic concepts, improving learning efficiency.

Findings

Fanzines facilitated better understanding of difficult concepts.

The approach was successfully implemented in a real course setting.

Students engaged more actively with the material.

Abstract

Specialized digital fanzines were successfully used to facilitate learning problematic concepts in an undergraduate programming course, dynamically adapting to student needs. The design of these fanzines favors creating and reading them quickly by establishing a common graphical layout, rules, and focusing in the most problematic parts of the concepts. This paper details the agile fanzine creation procedure, the way problematic concepts were identified and quickly handled, and how this approach was implemented in an actual course, so it could be applied to other courses with similar needs.