Essi Lahtinen

A study of the difficulties of novice programmers

Programming is related to several fields of technology, and many university students are studying the basics of it. Unfortunately, they often face difficulties already on the basic courses. This work studies the difficulties in learning programming in order to support developing learning materials for basic programming courses. The difficulties have to be recognized to be able to aid learning and teaching in an effective way.An international survey of opinions was organized for more than 500 students and teachers. This paper analyses the results of the survey. The survey provides information of the difficulties experienced and perceived when learning and teaching programming. The survey results also provide basis for recommendations for developing learning materials and approaches.

Developing a computer science-specific learning taxonomy

Blooms taxonomy of the cognitive domain and the SOLO taxonomy are being increasingly widely used in the design and assessment of courses, but there are some drawbacks to their use in computer science. This paper reviews the literature on educational taxonomies and their use in computer science education, identifies some of the problems that arise, proposes a new taxonomy and discusses how this can be used in application-oriented courses such as programming.

Kick-Start Activation to Novice Programming --- A Visualization-Based Approach

In the beginning of learning programming students have misconceptions of what programming is. We have used a kick-start activation in the beginning of an introductory programming course (CS1) to set the record straight. A kick-start activation means introducing the deep structure of programming before the surface structure by making the students solve a certain type of problem in the first lecture. The problem is related to a realistic computer program, simple enough for everyone to understand and allow students to participate in debugging. A visualization-based approach helps making the example more concrete for students. In this article we present the concept kick-start activation and one concrete example. To support the example, we have also developed a visualization using the visualization tool JHAVE. We got positive feedback on the example and suggest further development of kick-start activations in order to make the beginning of learning programming more motivating for students.

Annotations for Defining Interactive Instructions to Interpreter Based Program Visualization Tools

An interpreter based visualization tool can be used for creating visualization exercises that engage the student to work with the visualization instead of just watching it passively. This article describes how to make the interpreter instruct the student interactively. The idea is to use the interpreter for testing the code that the student has written and give the instructions according to the test results. This only requires minor work for implementation of the visualization tool.

Dynamic Evaluation Tree for Presenting Expression Evaluations Visually

Novice programmers have difficulties with their visual attention strategies when following program visualizations. This article presents work in progress on improving the user interfaces of visualization tools to support students in the visual attention problems. We introduce a user interface solution called the dynamic evaluation tree. The basic idea is to reduce the amount of separate windows of the user interface and thus make it possible to concentrate the visual attention more in one part of the screen.