Contemporary developments in teaching and learning introductory programming: Towards a research proposal

The teaching and learning of introductory programming in tertiary institutions is problematic. Failure rates are high and the inability of students to complete small programming tasks at the completion of introductory units is not unusual. The literature on teaching programming contains many examples of changes in teaching strategies and curricula that have been implemented in an effort to reduce failure rates. This paper analyses contemporary research into the area, and summarises developments in the teaching of introductory programming. It also focuses on areas for future research which will potentially lead to improvements in both the teaching and learning of introductory programming. A graphical representation of the issues from the literature that are covered in the document is provided in the introduction

Distributed-Pair Programming can work well and is not just Distributed Pair-Programming

Background: Distributed Pair Programming can be performed via screensharing or via a distributed IDE. The latter offers the freedom of concurrent editing (which may be helpful or damaging) and has even more awareness deficits than screen sharing. Objective: Characterize how competent distributed pair programmers may handle this additional freedom and these additional awareness deficits and characterize the impacts on the pair programming process. Method: A revelatory case study, based on direct observation of a single, highly competent distributed pair of industrial software developers during a 3-day collaboration. We use recordings of these sessions and conceptualize the phenomena seen. Results: 1. Skilled pairs may bridge the awareness deficits without visible obstruction of the overall process. 2. Skilled pairs may use the additional editing freedom in a useful limited fashion, resulting in potentially better fluency of the process than local pair programming. Conclusion: When applied skillfully in an appropriate context, distributed-pair programming can (not will!) work at least as well as local pair programming

A collaborative approach to learning programming: a hybrid learning model

The use of cooperative working as a means of developing collaborative skills has been recognised as vital in programming education. This paper presents results obtained from preliminary work to investigate the effectiveness of Pair Programming as a collaborative learning strategy and also its value towards improving programming skills within the laboratory. The potential of Problem Based Learning as a means of further developing cooperative working skills along with problem solving skills is also examined and a hybrid model encompassing both strategies outlined

The abstraction transition taxonomy: developing desired learning outcomes through the lens of situated cognition

We report on a post-hoc analysis of introductory programming lecture materials. The purpose of this analysis is to identify what knowledge and skills we are asking students to acquire, as situated in the activity, tools, and culture of what programmers do and how they think. The specific materials analyzed are the 133 Peer Instruction questions used in lecture to support cognitive apprenticeship -- honoring the situated nature of knowledge. We propose an Abstraction Transition Taxonomy for classifying the kinds of knowing and practices we engage students in as we seek to apprentice them into the programming world. We find students are asked to answer questions expressed using three levels of abstraction: English, CS Speak, and Code. Moreover, many questions involve asking students to transition between levels of abstraction within the context of a computational problem. Finally, by applying our taxonomy in classifying a range of introductory programming exams, we find that summative assessments (including our own) tend to emphasize a small range of the skills fostered in students during the formative/apprenticeship phase

Buffer loading and chunking in sequential keypressing

Thirty-six participants practiced a task in which they continuously cycled through a fixed series of nine keypresses, each carried out by a single finger (cf. Keele & Summers, 1976). The results of the first experimental phase, the practice phase, support the notion that pauses between successive keypresses at fixed locations induces the development of integrated sequence representations (i.e., motor chunks) and reject the idea that a rhythm is learned. When different sequences were produced in the transfer phase, performance dropped considerably unless the sequence was relatively short and there was ample time for preparation. This demonstrates that motor chunks are content specific and that the absence of motor chunks shows when there is no time for advance loading of the motor buffer or the capacity of the motor buffer is insufficient to contain the entire keypressing sequence