An effective learning and teaching model for programming languages

Abstract

Teaching and learning of programming languages is difficult as it involves the comprehension of theoretical background, practical usage of semantics and syntactic coding and algorithmic skills. Both teachers and students are unanimous about the programming fear of students, whereas programming skill is one of the core competences of computer science students. As a result, it is now a vital and an unavoidable issue to develop effective learning/teaching pedagogy for programming languages. Problem-based learning (PBL) is a well-established learning pedagogy where students engage themselves to self-learn, self-practice, and mainly focus on ill-structured problems. Traditional PBL is not fully suitable for the teaching and learning of programming languages to develop the required problem-solving skill. On the other hand, e-learning has been used in synchronous and asynchronous learning for the past few decades but not sufficient for developing programming skill. In this research, the authors have proposed a problem-based e-learning model which integrates traditional PBL with e-learning knowledge transfer. A problem model has also been proposed supporting structured, semistructured, and ill-structured problems. An architecture has been developed where a problem-bank is used to support the learning and teaching of multiple programming languages. An initial survey in the perspective of students has been performed to test the mannerism of the students about the model and found very positive result which accelerates further improvement of the system.