Experiences from placing Stack Overflow at the core of an intermediate programming course

Abstract

Objectivist methodologies do not align well the learning requirements of modern‐day computer science and software engineering, and major universities are moving from the old standards towards “learning by doing” approaches. We discuss the redesign of an intermediate Computer Programming course taught at the University of Vigo (Spain), seeking to promote question‐and‐answer websites for programmers as the main source of reference for the students, and turning the teacher into a permanent observer who delivers pertinent advice. The change of programming language, from Java to JavaScript, is also justified. A comparative experiment was conducted with 126 undergraduate students in Vigo (Spain) and Cuenca (Ecuador), revealing advantages in terms of understanding (22% increase in comprehension of new programming constructs), problem‐solving capabilities (16% improvement in correct operation of the developed systems) and even greater clarity in communication and documentation (53% better), along with positive perceptions by the students (19% increase).

Evaluating a large language model’s ability to solve programming exercises from an introductory bioinformatics course

“…With the ease of use and wide availability of tools like Copilot and ChatGPT, novices may quickly learn to rely on auto-suggested solutions without thinking about the computational steps involved—or reading problem statements carefully. Furthermore, if students copy and paste code without understanding it—as has been observed for an online forum [ 69 ]—they may underperform on summative assessments. One way that instructors could counter this behavior is to generate student-specific questions about their code.…”