Socratic Programming: An Innovative Programming Learning Method

Abstract

Abstract-In second language acquisition (SLA) environment, learner is a community member and communicates with others, whereas, in a foreign language learning, the practicing dimension is weaker. When it comes to programming, there is no community using a programming language, thus a SLA environment cannot exist. For this reason the most adopted way is teaching programming like a foreign language with all its drawbacks. In this paper we compare between programming language and natural language, knowing that the programming introductory courses have basic concepts without complex algorithms, in other terms more expressive than computational. We propose a new method of teaching programming based upon dialogues between a facilitator and students. The facilitator will be part of a communication between each student and the computer to make an environment suitable for a SLA. A Socratic way of learning is achieved with a teacher having few students and can participate with his students in their dialogue and helps through their guidance to express their ideas. We list 4 common programming problems and we showed that using dialogue and raising questions, students were able to resolve these problems.Index Terms-Memory concept, programming language, programming learning, Socratic dialogue. I. INTRODUCTIONProgramming has been always seen as a difficult discipline to learn and teach.Reference [1] reported that the rate of failure or drop in undergraduate programming courses varies from 25 to 80 %. The importance of the computer as an analysis or simulation tool in the experimental sciences makes the problem of introductory programming course a weighted issue. A synthesis of various studies of psychology and educational programming shows the different difficulties in learning programming. According to [2], students are not well oriented and don't know what programming is about also the computer is seen as a notional machine or as a black box [3]. The anthropomorphical errors are typical errors and are committed when the student assumes that the computer has a hidden intelligence and it is expected to understand what the student has in mind [4]. These difficulties are faced when using a classical approach in teaching and using a general purpose language and a professional environment according to [5] and [6]. According to ACM, the introductory course should include only basic concepts of programming without tackling complex algorithms [7]. At the level of resolving primitive problems, the use of a programming language is similar to the use of a natural language to a far extent. In this paper we will compare natural language to programming language in Section I, highlight the fact of learning a new language in Section II and describe the appealed difficulties in Section IV.The results of a study conducted are shown in Section V and a new approach in learning programming is emphasized. Section VI concludes this paper. II. NATURAL LANGUAGE AND PROGRAMMING LANGUAGEA natural language is a language used by humans to communicate. A ...

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