This Australasian focused review compares a number of recent studies that have identified
difficulties encountered by novices while learning programming and problem solving. These …

It is often debated whether a problem presented in a straightforward minimalist fashion is
better, or worse, for learning than the same problem presented with a" real-life" or" concrete" …

In recent years, computing education researchers have investigated the impact of problem
context on students' learning and programming performance. This work continues the …

This paper describes how programming strategies were explicitly instructed and assessed in
an introductory programming course and describes the impact of this curricular change. A …

Program-writing skills are often assessed with computer-based practical exams where
students are required to design, write and test small programs according to specifications …

This study examines the problem solving strategies used by expert programmers. Past
studies of the cognitive processes of expert programmers suggest the existence of plans that …

The goal in teaching computer programming is to develop in students the capabilities
required of a professional software developer. Beginner programmers suffer from a wide …

An experiment was conducted to test a curriculum that explicitly incorporated programming
strategies in lectures, written course materials, exercises and assessment. A control …

ABSTRACT CS1 students are often expected to learn to clarify a problem, decompose it into
subproblems, solve and test these subproblems as units, and then recompose the tested …

Many teachers of novice programmers have lamented that students either seem to have a
natural gift for programming, or have no gift for it at all. In this paper, we discuss a third group …