Kirsti Ala-Mutka

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.

Managing Distributed University Courses

The Open Source Courseware project (OSCu) is aimed at cooperative course development and implementation in university software-engineering education. Open materials and a distributed course implementation model offer effective means for knowledge sharing between universities. However, in practice there are many difficulties in managing distributed courses and the actual cooperation scheme. This article presents the major problems faced in the first four distributed courses, and the approaches that were developed and which are now used to deal with them.