The role of isolation principle in the design of mobile learning app to promote learners navigability and understanding of programming problems

The current design of mobile applications do not fully supports learners' learning of complex problems. For example, learning programming in mobile has always been considered as a critical issue in which it lacks of the effective pedagogy to support the representation of a learning content. Such lack could hinder learners' interest to learn with mobile due to the imposed amount of cognitive load needed for processing information in mobile. Thus, we proposed applying the isolation principle into the design of mobile apps to simplify learners' learning of programming by facilitating their mental processing of the learning contents. An isolated pedagogy is proposed to simplify the fragments of complex learning task. A total of 45 undergraduate students were asked to use the mobile learning app. Then, a questionnaire was administrated to all the participants to assess their perception about the app navigability and understanding of programming problems. The result showed that majority of students found the app to provide the required elements for them to freely navigate and understand the taught concept. It is assumed that structuring the learning contents into isolations would result in a better understanding than the unstructured one.