Masters Students' Experiences of Learning to Program: An Empirical Model

The investigation reported here examined how Masters students experience learning to program. The phenomenographic research approach adopted permitted the analysis of 1) how students go about learning to program, that is the ‘Act’ of learning to program, and 2) what students understand by ‘programming’, that is the ‘Object’ of learning to program. Analysis of data from twenty-three participants identified five different experiences of the Act of learning to program and five different experiences of the Object of learning to program. Together the findings comprise an empirical model of the learning to program experience amongst the participating students. We suggest how our findings are significant for programming teachers and offer tools to explore students’ views