Effective Methods for Teaching and Assessing Business Applications Programming at Introductory Level

Dr Niamh O Riordan

Whitaker Institute J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics, National University of Ireland, Galway

Wednesday, 28th November, 2012

“The graduating student who professes a complete inability to write a simple program is commonplace” (Jenkins, 2001)

‘‘One wonders [...] about teaching sophisticated material to

CS1students when study after study has shown that they do not understand basic loops…’’

(Winslow, 1996, p. 21).

“Many institutes report drop out rates of 20-40 percents, or even higher, of students on their introductory programming courses” (Kinnunen and Malbi, 2006)

“Colleges and universities routinely report that 50% or more of those students who initially choose computer

science study soon decide to abandon it” (ACM/IEEE)

The State of Play

Motivation:Useful and in demand

Challenge:Not ‘sexy’ and quite difficult

Principle:

Scope:

Overview

First year undergraduate students already enrolled in their first Business Application Programming (BAP) course, which combines lectures and tutorials and is based on Java

Content

TeacherStudent

EFFECTIVE METHODS

FIT!

Challenge #1 The ContentNot exactly a piece of cake!

“For programmers to develop competence, they need to have good problem solving skills and a thoroughly organised knowledge of the programming language” (Linn and Clancy, 1992)

[cf. on the cruelty of really teaching computer science Dijkstra (1989)]

The goal:To move from schemas to scripts andfrom comprehension to generation

Challenge #2 The TeacherNot always a help… - Blames the student- Blames the method- Misses the point

(Biggs, 1992)

“A teacher’s job is not to communicate the minutiae of syntax or the nuances of some particular language, but to persuade the students that learning to program (and so programming) would be a good thing” (Jenkins, 2001)

The goal:From transmission mode to Mr. Motivator

Motivation = Expectancy x Value

Not always so self-assured!

“You have to believe in yourself, that's the secret… I had to feel the exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it, you go down to defeat” – Charlie Chaplin

The goal:To embolden the student

Challenge #3 The Student

Effective methods

THANK YOU

Niamh O Riordanniamh.oriordan@nuigalway.ie