Does it help to have some programming experience before beginning a computing degree program?

Abstract

There is an intuitive perception that students with prior programming experience have an initial advantage in an introductory programming course, but that this advantage may decrease over the duration of the course if the style of programming is different from what the student has learnt previously. This paper reports on a study that indicates that students who have experience in at least one programming language at the beginning of an introductory programming course perform significantly better in the assessment than those with none, and that the more languages with which a student has experience, the better the performance tends to be.

Identifying predictors of success for an objects-first CS1

“…Evans and Simkin (1989) noted that prior BASIC programming experience was a predictor for scores on the second exam in an introductory BASIC programming course. Hagan and Markham (2000) also examined the effect of prior programming experience on performance in an introductory Java programming course. They found that the students with prior programming experience did better on the first and last stages of the course project (the second stage was omitted from their analysis) as well as the first two exams and the overall course grade.…”

Õppimine ja väljalangemine IKT erialade esimesel aastal Eesti kõrgkoolide näitel

“…Prior programming experience has been found to be useful for ICT students (Hagan & Markham, 2000;Kori et al, 2016), but the students who had learned ICT at a general education level did not find the knowledge to be useful at university. Students also had different goals for studying ICT at university, but only a few had sufficient information about the curriculum.…”

“…On leitud, et varasema programmeerimiskogemusega üliõpilased saavutavad paremaid õpitulemusi (Hagan & Markham, 2000) ja hindavad õpinguid kõrgkoolis lihtsamaks kui varasema programmeerimiskogemuseta üliõpilased (Kori, Pedaste, Leijen, & Tõnisson, 2016). Seega võivad IKT-õpingud keeruliste programmeerimise ja matemaatika õppeainete tõttu pooleli jätta just need üliõpilased, kellel puuduvad programmeerimiskogemused.…”

What about a simple language? Analyzing the difficulties in learning to program

“…Given the complex and rich syntax of Java, there is not time to cover all basic concepts during an introductory course; this was demonstrated by the lack of error handling above. In addition, programming courses at HS level should also inspire those students, who are interested in a future career as computer scientists; especially given that prior programming experience has been shown to have a positive impact on university CS studies (Hagan & Markham, 2000). HS is the place in which future university students receive their basic skills; should we not then concentrate on giving them a solid ground in algorithmic thinking and programming, instead of in programming languages and syntax?…”