Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming. This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research

A New Perspective on Teaching Computer Literacy

The first step in designing a college level computer literacy course is to define what is meant by computer literacy. Unfortunately no consensus exists as to what the label "computer literate" should imply. The difficulty in both defining computer literacy and designing a satisfactory computer literacy course is evident by both the frequency of change and experimentation occurring at many institutions and by the forests of textbooks that exist for such a course. In this paper we present a definition of computer literacy that is independent of any specific application or application genre and introduce the notion of application literacy as distinct from that of computer literacy. Finally we describe a course implementation strategy commensurate with our philosophy. 1 Introduction Computer Science departments, like other academic units, offer service courses for students whose major /minor is not computer science (or some other physical science). Typically at least one of these course..