Introductory Programming Course Research Articles

Effects of Guided Inquiry- based Learning and Teaching Approach on Students' Confidence, Motivation and Communication Skills in an Introductory Computer Programming Course

Effects of Guided Inquiry- based Learning and Teaching Approach on Students' Confidence, Motivation and Communication Skills in an Introductory Computer Programming Course

Analyzing novices' fun and programming behaviours while playing a serious blocks-based game

Blocks-based environments have been used to promote programming learning mostly in elementary and middle schools. In many countries, isolated initiatives have been launched to promote programming learning among children, but until now there is no evidence of widespread use of this type of environment in Brazil and Portugal. Consequently, it is common that many students reach higher education with little or no programming knowledge and skills. NoBug’s SnackBar is a game designed to help promote programming learning. This study examined students' behavior and attitudes when playing the game on their initiative. It used a sample of 33 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory programming course. The variables studied were students' performance and engagement, satisfaction, and problem-solving strategies. The main findings were (1) better performing students had a high level of perceived learning, (2) all the students had similar perceptions about their fun while playing, (3) the leader board was the most used game element not directly related to learning and (4) the top-ranked students access previous solutions to help them solve a new mission, while the others often use a trial-and-error approach.

Learning From Errors: Exploring the Effectiveness of Enhanced Error Messages in Learning to Program.

Error messages provided by the programming environments are often cryptic and confusing to learners. This study explored the effectiveness of enhanced programming error messages (EPEMs) in a Python-based introductory programming course. Participants were two groups of middle school students. The control group only received raw programming error messages (RPEMs) and had 35 students. The treatment group received EPEMs and had 33 students. During the class, students used an automated assessment tool called Mulberry to practice their programming skill. Mulberry automatically collected all the solutions students submitted when solving programming problems. Data analysis was based on 6339 student solutions collected by Mulberry. Our results showed that EPEMs did not help to reduce student errors or improve students’ performance in debugging. The ineffectiveness of EPEMs may result from reasons such as the inaccuracy of the interpreter’s error messages or students not reading the EPEMs. However, the viewpoint of productive failure may provide a better explanation of the ineffectiveness of EPEMs. The failures in coding and difficulties in debugging can be resources for learning. We recommend that researchers reconsider the role of errors in code and investigate whether and how failures and debugging contribute to the learning of programming.

The Effects of Self-regulated Learning Strategies on Computer Programming Achievement in Teacher Education

This study investigates the effects of student use of self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies on their computer programming achievement. Ninety-six students from undergraduate teacher training programmes offered by a Hong Kong university voluntarily participated in the study. Sixty-six of them were first-year students enrolling on an introductory Java programming course, while 30 were second-year students enrolling on an advanced Java programming course. The SRL strategies adopted by participants were measured by the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) and were exemplified from the reflective writing of their electronic portfolios. Their achievement in computer programming was evaluated using continuous and end of course assessments. The findings of this study suggest that higher-order cognitive strategies (i.e. elaboration, organization, critical thinking), metacognitive control strategies (i.e. self-regulation) and resource management strategies (i.e. time and study environment management, help seeking) are likely to facilitate a prolonged achievement of computer programming for both novices and non-novices. They can provide insights into designing adequate SRL strategy training to support student learning in computer programming.

Creativity in CS1: A Literature Review

Computer science is a fast-growing field in today’s digitized age, and working in this industry often requires creativity and innovative thought. An issue within computer science education, however, is that large introductory programming courses often involve little opportunity for creative thinking within coursework. The undergraduate introductory programming course (CS1) is notorious for its poor student performance and retention rates across multiple institutions. Integrating opportunities for creative thinking may help combat this issue by adding a personal touch to course content, which could allow beginner CS students to better relate to the abstract world of programming. Research on the role of creativity in computer science education (CSE) is an interesting area with a lot of room for exploration due to the complexity of the phenomenon of creativity as well as the CSE research field being fairly new compared to some other education fields where this topic has been more closely explored.To contribute to this area of research, this article provides a literature review exploring the concept of creativity as relevant to computer science education and CS1 in particular. Based on the review of the literature, we conclude creativity is an essential component to computer science, and the type of creativity that computer science requires is in fact, a teachable skill through the use of various tools and strategies. These strategies include the integration of open-ended assignments, large collaborative projects, learning by teaching, multimedia projects, small creative computational exercises, game development projects, digitally produced art, robotics, digital story-telling, music manipulation, and project-based learning. Research on each of these strategies and their effects on student experiences within CS1 is discussed in this review. Last, six main components of creativity-enhancing activities are identified based on the studies about incorporating creativity into CS1. These components are as follows: Collaboration, Relevance, Autonomy, Ownership, Hands-On Learning, and Visual Feedback. The purpose of this article is to contribute to computer science educators’ understanding of how creativity is best understood in the context of computer science education and explore practical applications of creativity theory in CS1 classrooms. This is an important collection of information for restructuring aspects of future introductory programming courses in creative, innovative ways that benefit student learning.

Experiential study to integrate theory and lab for an introductory programming course in an Indian engineering classroom

At present, programming is a crucial competence for employability that is a requirement for engineering graduates. In India, all engineering students are required to register for an introductory programming course at the Freshmen level. Over the years, this introductory programming course is taught in a traditional chalk and talk approach. Traditionally, theory and lab classes were conducted separately. This kind of traditional approach limited students’ ability to think logically and develop problem-solving skills through programming. On that account, to encourage experiential learning which improves students’ logical thinking and problem-solving skills, this action research study looked at the possibility of implementing an integrated theory lab approach to a freshman C Programming course. Based on the course credits, the students met eight hours each week as part of the integrated implementation. A pretest posttest experimental research approach was used to examine the effects of the integrated pedagogical strategy. The classes for the students in the integrated approach were conducted directly in the laboratory to ensure meaningful learning and to enable more hands-on coding practice in the classroom simultaneously while the concepts were taught. Active and peer learning activities were designed to help students learn meaningfully. Due to the short intervention time and small sample size, there was no statistically significant effect to this integrated approach. However, the classroom activities increased hands-on practice time and regular formative assessments showed that students’ programming competency including logical thinking and problem-solving skills were improved through this integrated approach.

E-Learning Based Web Programming Course in the COVID 19 Pandemic Time

The learning process in the STKIP PGRI West Sumatra Informatics Education Study Program still uses conventional learning methods, namely through face-to-face contact between lecturers and students in the class. The traditional learning method currently taking place has limitations that can hinder the learning process, such as limited time and space to interact with each other, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. With these conditions, the online learning process is an alternative to support learning in its current state, with technological developments that can simplify the learning process and make the time more flexible and support the learning process anywhere, anytime, and anyone. An electronic learning system (E-Learning) was created from these conditions, which is expected to be an alternative solution for online learning to overcome the STKIP PGRI West Sumatra Informatics Education Study Program's limitations, especially in introductory web programming courses. E-learning is designed using the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) method supported by the PHP programming language and implementing the Laravel Framework. The learning process using E-learning is designed using localhost as the central server. This study's results resulted in an E-learning application built based on the analysis and design recommended by the STKIP PGRI West Sumatra informatics education study program. With this application, it is hoped that it can simplify the online learning process, especially in existing introductory web programming courses.

Study Behavior in Computing Education—A Systematic Literature Review

As the field of computing education grows and matures, it has become essential to unite computing education and higher education research. Educational research has highlighted that how students study is crucial to their learning progress, and study behaviors have been found to play an important role in students’ academic success. This article presents the main results of a systematic literature review intended to determine what we know about the study behaviors of computing students and the role of educational design in shaping them. A taxonomy of study behaviors was developed and used to clarify and classify the definitions of study behavior, process, strategies, habits, and tactics as well as to identify their relationship to the educational context. The literature search resulted in 107 included papers, which were analyzed according to defined criteria and variables. The review of study behavior terminology found that the same terms are used to describe substantially different study behaviors, and the lack of standard terminology makes it difficult to compare findings from different papers. Furthermore, it was more common for papers to use study behaviors to explain other aspects of students rather than exploring and understanding them. Additionally, the results revealed a tendency to focus on specific educational contexts, predominantly introductory programming courses. Although computing education as a field is well equipped to expand the knowledge about both study behaviors and their connection to the educational context, the lack of common terminology and theories limits the impact. The taxonomy of study behaviors in computing education proposed in this article can contribute to contextualizing the research in such a way that researchers and educators across institutional borders can compare and utilize results. Last, the article outlines some areas for future research and recommendations for practice.

PuzzleMe: Leveraging Peer Assessment for In-Class Programming Exercises

Peer assessment, as a form of collaborative learning, can engage students in active learning and improve their learning gains. However, current teaching platforms and programming environments provide little support to integrate peer assessment for in-class programming exercises. We identified challenges in conducting such exercises and adopting peer assessment through formative interviews with instructors of introductory programming courses. To address these challenges, we introduce PuzzleMe, a tool to help Computer Science instructors to conduct engaging in-class programming exercises. PuzzleMe leverages peer assessment to support a collaboration model where students provide timely feedback on their peers' work. We propose two assessment techniques tailored to in-class programming exercises: live peer testing and live peer code review. Live peer testing can improve students' code robustness by allowing them to create and share lightweight tests with peers. Live peer code review can improve code understanding by intelligently grouping students to maximize meaningful code reviews. A two-week deployment study revealed that PuzzleMe encourages students to write useful test cases, identify code problems, correct misunderstandings, and learn a diverse set of problem-solving approaches from peers.

Aligning and Assessing Teaching Approaches With SOLO Taxonomy in a Computer Programming Course

A teaching approach plays an important role in teaching and learning process of an introductory programming (IP) course. The teaching approach should focus on different programming skills required by novice programmers. In this study, we introduced the teaching and learning approach based on an ADRI (Approach, Deployment, Result, Improvement) approach in the IP course which focuses on both programming knowledge (syntax and semantics) and problem solving strategies. We compared the teaching and learning approach of the IP course with the five levels of SOLO taxonomy. We assessed the students’ performance by using different assessment tasks based on the four stages of the ADRI approach. Results show that the current teaching and learning approach of the IP course addressed all the five levels of SOLO taxonomy. The students’ performance in the Approach and Result stages (82%) are good, and the performance in the Improvement (71%) and Deployment (69%) stages are satisfactory. Overall, the ADRI approach provides positive impact on the teaching and learning process of the IP course.

Aligning and assessing teaching approach with SOLO taxonomy in a computer programming course

A teaching approach plays an important role in teaching and learning process of an introductory programming (IP) course. The teaching approach should focus on different programming skills required by novice programmers. In this study, we introduced the teaching and learning approach based on an ADRI (Approach, Deployment, Result, Improvement) approach in the IP course which focuses on both programming knowledge (syntax and semantics) and problem solving strategies. We compared the teaching and learning approach of the IP course with the five levels of SOLO taxonomy. We assessed the students’ performance by using different assessment tasks based on the four stages of the ADRI approach. Results show that the current teaching and learning approach of the IP course addressed all the five levels of SOLO taxonomy. The students’ performance in the Approach and Result stages (82%) are good, and the performance in the Improvement (71%) and Deployment (69%) stages are satisfactory. Overall, the ADRI approach provides positive impact on the teaching and learning process of the IP course.

A Retrospective Study for the Selection of Suitable Programming Language for the High Schools in Pakistan

Computer programming is now increasingly becoming a compulsory subject at the high school level. The main purpose of the introduction of programming languages at this stage is to develop logic and reasoning skills that may help students in their ordinary activities. Pakistani schools have also started introducing computer programming at the high school level. GWBasic and C are two major languages being used to teach this introductory course. This paper presents the difficulties faced by the students to learn programming languages in the high schools of Pakistan while learning in any of these two languages. To this end, the content of the course has been divided into three difficulty levels. A survey based approach has been employed to get useful data from the students who have been taught this course in either of the aforementioned languages. A detailed questionnaire has been created and is filled by the student to express the ease of learning for different concepts. The collected data enables us to perform a retrospective analysis to figure out as to which language offers a smoother and easier learning curve at a given level. The results show that GWBasic is relatively easier language for the students to learn introductory course in computer programming. The accumulated data also reveals that the students struggle to learn advanced concepts that invites for a revision of curriculum or pedagogical practices being followed to teach this course.

A Guided Scratch Visual Execution Environment to Introduce Programming Concepts to CS1 Students

First-year computer science (CS1) university students traditionally have difficulties understanding how to program. This paper describes research introducing CS1 students to programming concepts using a Scratch programming language guided visual execution environment (VEE). The concepts addressed are those from an introductory programming course (sequences, variables, operators, conditionals, loops, and events and parallelism). The VEE guides novice students through programming concepts, explaining and guiding interactive exercises executed in Scratch by using metaphors and serious games. The objective of this study is, firstly, to investigate if a cohort of 124 CS1 students, from three distinct groups, studying at the same university, are able to improve their programming skills guided by the VEE. Secondly, is the improvement different for various programming concepts? All the CS1 students were taught the module by the same tutor in four 2-h sessions (8 h), and a qualitative research approach was adopted. The results show students significantly improved their programming knowledge, and this improvement is significant for all the programming concepts, although greater for certain concepts such as operators, conditionals, and loops than others. It also shows that students lacked initial knowledge of events and parallelism, though most had used Scratch during their high school years. The sequence concept was the most popular concept known to them. A collateral finding in this study is how the students’ previous knowledge and learning gaps affected grades they required to access and begin study at the university level.

Machine Learning Prediction and Recommendation Framework to Support Introductory Programming Course

The new students struggle to understand the introductory programming courses, due to its intricate nature, which results in higher dropout and increased failure rates. Despite implementing productive methodologies, the instructor struggles to identify the students with distinctive levels of skills. The modern institutes are looking for technology-equipped practices to classify the students and prepare personalized consultation procedures for each class. This paper applies decision tree-based machine learning classifiers to develop a prediction model competent to forecast the outcome of the introductory programming students at an early stage of the semester. The model is then transformed into an adaptive consultation framework which generates three types of colored signals; red, yellow, and green which illustrates whether the student is performing low, average, or high respectively. This provides an opportunity for the instructor to set precautionary measures for low performing students and set complicated tasks that help the highly skilled students to improve their skills further. The experiments compare a set of decision tree-based classifiers and conclude J48 as an efficient model in classifying students in all classes with high accuracy, sensitivity, and F-measure. Even though the aim of the research is to focus on introductory programming courses, however, the framework is flexible and can be implemented in other courses.

Enhancing problem‐solving skills of novice programmers in an introductory programming course

Enhancing problem‐solving skills of novice programmers in an introductory programming course

Early Prediction for At-Risk Students in an Introductory Programming Course Based on Student Self-Efficacy

Data Mining is a growing field, a strand of which is Educational data mining (EDM). EDM is currently used to help institutions and students through creating accurate predictions that are considered in decision making. One of EDM’s concerns is that of predicting students’ academic performance and fundamental learning difficulties in a particular course. In fact, EDM can help computer science (CS)-enrolled students to predict whether they can pass their courses without taking further action. An introductory programming course is usually the first challenging course faced by students in CS departments since a student’s performance in such a course is highly based on their intellectual skills. This paper presents a real case study from one of Saudi Arabia’s leading universities. This study used well-known prediction models— specifically, decision tree (DT), k-nearest neighbor (kNN), Naïve Bayes (NB), and support vector machine (SVM) models—to create a reliable prediction model for at-risk students in an introductory programming course using preliminary performance information showing their self-efficacy. The results of this study showed that the DT and SVM models yielded the best performance with the highest accuracy rate (99.18%). Furthermore, comparisons between the applied models were conducted with different evaluation metrics.

Using flipped classroom and peer instruction methodologies to improve introductory computer programming courses

Learning to write computer programs and engaging students in introductory programming subjects are difficult tasks. This study presents the results obtained when using flipped classroom and peer instruction methodologies in an introductory course of programming. Before the lecture, out-of-class study and on-line homework questionnaires were applied, and peer instruction was used in the classroom to encourage students' participation and discussion, assisted by an on-the-fly assessment app. The main academic results, the degree of involvement in the course activities, and the students' feedback were collected and compared with similar data from previous academic years. Significantly better pass (χ2 = 12.94, p < .001) and dropout rates (χ2 = 7.08, p < .01) were obtained when using flipped classroom and peer instruction. Laboratory attendance also improved significantly (χ2 = 27.62, p < .001). Our results showed significant positive correlations between the work performed at home and the grade obtained in the final exam (ρ = 0.51, p < .001). According to the students' opinions, class preparation at home increased significantly (χ2 = 46.59, p < .001) by 33% due to the new methodologies used. These results, based on a sample of six offerings of the same programming course, suggest that the application of flipped classroom and peer instruction improves the quality of the autonomous work of the students as well as their involvement in the lectures, and therefore, their knowledge acquisition improves.

Teaching and Learning to Program: Umbrella Review of Introductory Programming in Higher Education

Introductory programming courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees are critical to student success throughout the students’ academic and professional route but have traditional failure and dropout rates. The number of publications and reviews on the subject is growing, so we realize the need to prepare an umbrella review, or review of reviews, to group previous studies and extract more comprehensive and ambitious results. Based on the databases ACM, Google Scholar, IEEE, SCOPUS and Web of Science libraries, a formal search was created that resulted in 21 reviews on programming fundamentals in higher education context. Results include bibliometric information on the CS1 reviews, in the context of higher education (namely annual evolution, number and information on authors, types and sources of information, countries of affiliation, languages, keywords and most cited articles), the purpose of the reviews and research questions, methods (namely search strategy, databases used, eligibility criteria) and results (number of records and tables or divisions were made to catalog the articles). We present a taxonomy with four different types of purpose: general, specific, student group and teacher directed. We found very interesting catalogs that can serve as a tool for future work, whether by researchers in the field or by authors who intend to carry out reviews related to introduction to programming, especially in the context of higher education.

Introductory programming course: review and future implications.

The introductory programming course (IPC) holds a special significance in computing disciplines as this course serves as a prerequisite for studying the higher level courses. Students generally face difficulties during their initial stages of learning how to program. Continuous efforts are being made to examine this course for identifying potential improvements. This article presents the review of the state-of-the-art research exploring various components of IPC by examining sixty-six articles published between 2014 and 2020 in well-reputed research venues. The results reveal that several useful methods have been proposed to support teaching and learning in IPC. Moreover, the research in IPC presented useful ways to conduct assessments, and also demonstrated different techniques to examine improvements in the IPC contents. In addition, a variety of tools are evaluated to support the related course processes. Apart from the aforementioned facets, this research explores other interesting dimensions of IPC, such as collaborative learning, cognitive assessments, and performance predictions. In addition to reviewing the recent advancements in IPC, this study proposes a new taxonomy of IPC research dimensions. Furthermore, based on the successful practices that are listed in the literature, some useful guidelines and advices for instructors have also been reported in this article. Lastly, this review presents some pertinent open research issues to highlight the future dimensions for IPC researchers.

Comparison of C++ and Java in Implementing Introductory Programming Algorithms

Computer programming is the heart of computer science and C++ and Java are the most popular and widely used languages. The performance of C++ and Java programming languages has been benchmarked using robotics, numerical, genetic and evolutionary algorithms, but not using introductory programming algorithms. This article examined C++ and Java by analysing the implementation of novice algorithms of introductory programming courses by evaluating the difficulty, effort, time and delivered bugs of programs with Halstead software metrics. The study identified that Java is more difficult than C++ in the implementation of selected algorithms. Similarly, the efforts required to translate the novice algorithms in Java are higher than C++. The time involved in translating selected algorithms in C++ is lower than Java. Similarly, the number of delivered bugs in C++ is lower than Java. The study suggests that C++ is more suitable than Java for the implementation of introductory programming algorithms and reasonably more suitable for introductory programming courses. The study emboldens the programming linguists to do further analyses in contemplating other programming languages with Halstead software metrics and other kinds of algorithms.