A study of the difficulties of novice programmers

Abstract

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.

A Serious Game for Learning C Programming Language Concepts Using Solo Taxonomy

“…Presenting learning concepts in a thoughtful and concrete way: The study conducted by Essi Lahtinen & all [5]pointed out that learners find abstract concepts such as pointers and memory management hard to understand, which sometimes require a good understanding of the running of the program itself and the computer architecture. Another study conducted by Milne and Rowe [6]shows similar results: the most difficult concepts to understand in C programming language are pointers, recursion and data structures.…”

Teaching GUI-Programming Concepts to Prospective K12 ICT Teachers: MIT App Inventor as an Alternative to Text-Based Languages

“…Researchers have frequently pointed out that computer programming is a very difficult subject for students (Cornforth, 2014;Fujiwara, Fushida, Tamada, Igaki, & Yoshida, 2012;Lahtinen, Ala-Mutka, & Järvinen, 2005;Proulx, 2000). It has even been mentioned that one out of three students fails the class at entry level programming courses in universities (Bennedsen & Caspersen, 2007) and that programming is one of the most difficult subjects in the undergraduate curriculum (Jenkins, 2002).…”

Um minicurso online de Algoritmos como apoio às disciplinas iniciais da graduação: preparação, execução e resultados sobre a satisfação dos alunos

“…Zanetti e Bonacin (2014) afirmam que a aprendizagem da programação é um processo difícil devido à necessidade de um alto nível de abstração e do entendimento de alguma linguagem de programação. Os alunos iniciantes não possuem habilidades e competências relacionadas ao raciocínio lógico e à resolução de problemas, tendo dificuldades na utilização do ambiente de desenvolvimento, na compreensão das estruturas de programação, no entendimento da sintaxe, na divisão das funcionalidades em procedimentos e na localização dos erros no programa [Gomes et al, 2008]; além disso, os métodos pedagógicos apresentados são inadequados [Lahtinen et al, 2005]. Apesar dos professores buscarem a aplicação de técnicas inovadoras, percebe-se o desinteresse pelo curso, a desmotivação para o estudo de programação, as reprovações sistemáticas, a apatia, a baixa autoestima, a desistência da disciplina e até o abandono do curso [Delgado et al, 2005].…”