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> These problems are more typo/syntax-based rather than logic-based. Interestingly enough, syntax-based mistakes are often the first hurdles students encounter

> These problems are more typo/syntax-based rather than logic-based. Interestingly enough, syntax-based mistakes are often the first hurdles students encounter in programming, as described in Altadmri's paper. They also go on to observe that these mistakes do subside as the semester progresses as students "get used" to syntax, while logic-based errors will persist. While editors can provide some benefit to these issues, they can also be rather complex; often designed for industry rather than education. However these issues persist even with BlueJ, the IDE used in Altadmri's paper, which is an education-focused development environment. My current research on the topic encourages the use of lower-level exercises (even typing exercises) with CS examples to help students get familiar with coding's syntactic structures without problem solving [1]. As a result, students are struggling on correctly solving the coding problem while struggling to correctly implement the syntax necessary. My recommendation is to rather provide additional practice opportunities that isolate these lower level skills so students aren't trying to problem solving AND refine their skills at the same time. In addition, these lower level exercises can provide students with additional examples that can be more beneficial that simply showing them code snippets [2]. These examples can help serve as 'templates' that students can refer to when they encounter similar problems. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177 [2] https://educationaldatamining.org/EDM2021/virtual/static/pdf/EDM21_paper_88.pdf https://educationaldatamining.org/EDM2021/virtual/static/pdf...

ryanianian 5y ago
The typing exercises remind me of 80s/90s computer magazines having basic/asm code for interesting programs or games. You had to retype them to run them. It was slightly before my time, but I suspect a large number of people got through the "learn the tooling" stage simply by retyping, looking for the mis-type when they got it wrong, and learning how to understand the feedback. The natural next thing to do is to try to change some values and see what happens. All of a sudden you're learning how the whole program and environment work together and can always go back to a known good state by retyping what the paper says.
- tsumnia 5y ago
  > The typing exercises remind me of 80s/90s computer magazines YUP! I've been collecting the old Usbourne and Micro Adventure books and typically bring them along when I give presentations to say "This is how they did it in the old days! Let's do it again!" I then compare it to other "technical" skills like playing an instrument, acting, and martial arts. Each one has a "you gotta memorize/drill this" phase that is imperative to higher level performance, creativity, or problem solving. > The natural next thing to do is to try to change some values and see what happens. There is some work out of the UK known as PRIMM that uses this as one of their initial steps [1]. I spoke with Sue Sentance at SIGCSE in 2017 when she presented her studies and it sounds like another cool way to present coding practice without problem solving. John Edwards out of Utah is also doing "simple syntax exercises" [2] for his style of drilling where you have students do 20-30 exercises on a concept without very minor changes like "make the loop go 3 times; now 4; now go backwards from 4 to 0; etc.". [1] https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/cser/2017/09/01/primm-a-structured-approach-to-teaching-programming/ https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/cser/2017/09/01/primm-a-structured-a... [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3372782.3406259 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3372782.3406259

ryanianian 5y ago

The typing exercises remind me of 80s/90s computer magazines having basic/asm code for interesting programs or games. You had to retype them to run them. It was slightly before my time, but I suspect a large number of people got through the "learn the tooling" stage simply by retyping, looking for the mis-type when they got it wrong, and learning how to understand the feedback. The natural next thing to do is to try to change some values and see what happens. All of a sudden you're learning how the whole program and environment work together and can always go back to a known good state by retyping what the paper says.

tsumnia 5y ago
> The typing exercises remind me of 80s/90s computer magazines YUP! I've been collecting the old Usbourne and Micro Adventure books and typically bring them along when I give presentations to say "This is how they did it in the old days! Let's do it again!" I then compare it to other "technical" skills like playing an instrument, acting, and martial arts. Each one has a "you gotta memorize/drill this" phase that is imperative to higher level performance, creativity, or problem solving. > The natural next thing to do is to try to change some values and see what happens. There is some work out of the UK known as PRIMM that uses this as one of their initial steps [1]. I spoke with Sue Sentance at SIGCSE in 2017 when she presented her studies and it sounds like another cool way to present coding practice without problem solving. John Edwards out of Utah is also doing "simple syntax exercises" [2] for his style of drilling where you have students do 20-30 exercises on a concept without very minor changes like "make the loop go 3 times; now 4; now go backwards from 4 to 0; etc.". [1] https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/cser/2017/09/01/primm-a-structured-approach-to-teaching-programming/ https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/cser/2017/09/01/primm-a-structured-a... [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3372782.3406259 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3372782.3406259