Pedagogical Content for Professors of Introductory Programming Courses

Abstract

Teaching introductory programming requires knowledge of both content and pedagogy. Pedagogy includes understanding the typical difficulties students face as they learn, as well as recognizing didactic strategies professors can use to help students to overcome these difficulties. Our research aims to improve the pedagogical knowledge instructors have to teach introductory programming courses, especially those new in this area. We conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with instructors who teach introductory programming courses and collected diaries filled by 110 students during their studies. Qualitative analysis of this data revealed a set of difficulties students faced when learning programming basics and a set of didactic strategies professors use to mitigate them. The results were reviewed by senior instructors in order to confirm them and by junior instructors to verify the importance of this material from their perspective. The main contribution of our paper is a set of difficulties faced by students learning programming, a classification of the most harmful challenges, and the didactic strategies usually used to teach and avoid them. Thus, we provide the basis for the pedagogical content necessary to junior and senior professors planning introductory programming courses.