Survey of prior programming knowledge at the university level
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24215/15146774e057Keywords:
teaching programming, university level, previous knowledgeAbstract
In recent years, a predominant role has been given to the teaching of programming at all levels of education. Many alternatives have also appeared to learn to program independently. As a result of these processes, the students entering university may have heterogeneous prior programming knowledge. University computer science courses usually assume no prior knowledge about programming but that is increasingly becoming far from reality.
In this work we propose to characterize, based on their previous knowledge of programming, the population of university students who study the subject Introduction to Programming at the National University of Quilmes, a subject that was originally intended to teach basic programming concepts to students without any prior knowledge in the area. We developed a diagnostic test to investigate previous experiences in programming, and evaluate some concepts about syntactic constructions of programming languages.
Our findings show the enormous heterogeneity of the public, having students who learned programming concepts at different stages (at school, with online courses, self-taught), with different programming languages (both in text and in blocks) and also, with very different perceptions regarding how much they really know.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Gonzalo Pablo Fernández, Cecilia Martínez, Pablo E. “Fidel” Martínez López
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