Teaching Basic Programming Skills to Undergraduate Students

Learning programming is difficult and it presents great challenge for educators. It is a complex intellectual activity which is learned by a lot of practice. The goal is to increase success rate of introductory programming courses. First year students have problems with understanding basic abstract programming concepts resulting in low success rates of introductory programming courses. Most of undergraduate students at Faculty of Science are novice programmers interested in different major subjects having to cope with limited time available for learning. Students lose their confidence and motivation when they encounter difficulties such as programming environment, language syntax knowledge, problem understanding and debugging. Large groups of students prevent teachers from giving appropriate individualized feedback. In order to address problems properly, students’ background had to be investigated to establish influence of prior education to introductory programming courses realisation. Students’ background taken into account begins with primary and high school computer science courses which are supposed to prepare them for university. Instead of expected, we get many students with no programming knowledge and skills. It is also common knowledge that adults have more difficulties with learning programming than children. In order to make the difference, we mediated at the university level by introducing different programming languages and technologies while monitoring students’ results and satisfaction rate. Our faculty is also educating computer science teachers which make our task more demanding. Both learning and teaching programming are difficult tasks. Teachers with a strong understanding of the subject matter they teach are more likely to produce successful students.