Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, and Assessments for Introductory Programming Course

Abstract

Learning to program involves acquisition of various skills including problem solving, fundamental design techniques as well as critical thinking. Generally, most of the novice programmers struggle to develop all these important skill. The research community has addressed the problem in many different ways while involving improvisations in curriculum, pedagogical methods, cognitive aspects, supporting tools, and in designing assessments. This research aims to analyze and synthesize the existing literature in the aforementioned areas. Research articles pertaining to the area of Introductory Programming Courses (IPC) have been found using appropriate search queries, while nearly 60 research articles, published in last ten years, have been carefully selected by employing a systematic filtering process. The scope of this work only covers the research conducted for IPC in higher education. Main findings of this study show that "solution proposal" and "evaluation research" have been reported as two main research types adopted by these studies. Moreover, pedagogy, language choice and students' performance analysis are the most frequently addressed aspects of IPC; whereas, curriculum contents, assessment design, and teaching/learning through tools have appeared as less addressed aspects of IPC. Furthermore, a taxonomy of IPC has been presented based on the studied literature. Lastly, general considerations and future research directions have been presented for the practitioners and researchers in this area.

Mobile-assisted and gamification-based language learning: a systematic literature review

“…Following the standard assessment, backward snowballing was performed, employing a reference list from any completed analysis to retrieve papers ( Mehmood et al, 2020 ) and chose only those significant articles that met inclusion/exclusion requirements. After reading the introduction and then other portions of the document, the article's inclusion/exclusion was determined.…”

A Systematic Mapping of Introductory Programming Languages for Novice Learners

“…Hence, specifying inclusion and exclusion criteria for the paper selection process and declaring a set of classification criteria to classify the papers into subsections should be completed before the evaluation process. In the context of the introductory programming languages, researchers often classified the selected papers using criteria such as pedagogy [11], [27]- [30], curriculum, and the general-purpose programming language it caters to [11], [27], [28], [31], language representation [7], [8], method of assessment [28], [29] and the students [28].…”

“…Additionally, partially prototyped platforms, studies dedicated exclusively to non-programming learners, and languages catered towards other branches of programming such as data structures, flowcharts, and database query languages were also observed to be common exclusion criteria [28], [31]. Although there are multiple systematic reviews conducted focusing on the introductory languages and platforms catering to tertiary education, a significant lack of literature concerning comprehensive reviews on primary and secondary education can be noticed [11], [28], [31], [32]. Hence, the key focus of the literature evaluated in the review presented in this paper is the primary and secondary education levels.…”

“…Due to this situation, there are many educational programming platforms today which target novice learners of different age groups specifically. These platforms and languages have been designed to build interest and lower the barriers for novices to enter into programming by reducing the frustrations caused by excessive focus on syntax and semantics [11]. Many of these languages including Scratch, Alice, and Blockly make use of rich multi-media content, interactive environments, and predefined code blocks to eliminate syntax errors and engage users more actively [12]- [14].…”

Assessing Young Students’ Design Thinking Disposition and Its Relationship With Computer Programming Self-Efficacy

“…In sum, although some previous studies (Mehmood et al., 2020; Omer et al., 2020) have made efforts to understand computer science majors’ programming learning in higher education, few have examined the computer programming self-efficacy of middle to high school students and university non-computer-science majors as well as its relation to the students’ design thinking dispositions. Thus, the current study aimed to develop a scale, the Design Thinking Disposition Scale (DTDS), to examine young students’ dispositions of design thinking, so that we can examine the relationship between young students’ design thinking dispositions and their computer programming self-efficacy.…”