Fostering Programming Resilience: Developing a Scale for Secondary Schools

In the realm of programming education, students often face challenges such as syntax and logic errors, necessitating resilience to persevere through programming problems. Programming resilience is essential for school students as it nurtures problem-solving abilities, perseverance, creativity, adaptability, confidence, and essential life skills that extend beyond coding. To address this, the present study introduces the Programming Resilience Scale for Secondary Schools (PR3S) tailored for secondary school students in Malaysia engaging with robotics education through mobile robot programming. For the PR3S, 13 items were retained for the five constructs, namely: persistence, perceived value, difficulty cognition, incremental belief, and building networks. Data was collected from 90 secondary students participating in robotics programs. Validity assessments demonstrated the scale's efficacy in measuring programming resilience among secondary school students engaging with robotics education. Notably, findings revealed no significant differences were observed among gender, location, age, and background knowledge. Students' preferences have an impact on the resilience of students in learning programming, students who have an interest in robotics and programming achieved higher scores compared to students who do not have an interest. The PR3S is anticipated to serve as a valuable tool for educators and researchers in identifying students encountering challenges in programming, facilitating early interventions, and promoting resilience-building activities within the context of robotics programming education in Malaysian secondary schools.