Effective Methods for Teaching and Assessing Business Applications Programming at Introductory Level
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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, 28 th November, 2012
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Transcript of Effective Methods for Teaching and Assessing Business Applications Programming at Introductory Level
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
