A study of student problems in learning to program

Abstract: Programming is a core subject within Computer Science curricula and many also consider it a particularly difficult subject to learn. There have been many studies and suggestions on what causes these difficulties and what can be done to improve the situation.This thesis builds on previous work, trying to understand what difficulties students have when learning to program. The included papers cover several areas encountered when trying to learn programming.In Paper I we study how students use annotations during problem solving. The results show that students who annotate more also tend to be more successful. However, the results also indicate that there might be a cultural bias towards the use of annotations.Not only do students have problems with programming, they also have problems with designing software. Even graduating students fail to a large extent on simple design tasks. Our results in Paper II show that the majority of the students do not go beyond restating the problem when asked to design a system.Getting stuck is something that most learners experience at one time or another. In Paper III we investigate how successful students handle these situations. The results show that the students use a large number of different strategies to get unstuck and continue their learning. Many of the strategies involve social interaction with peers and others.In Papers IV, V, and VI we study what students experience as being key and threshold concepts in Computer Science. The results show that understanding particular concepts indeed affect the students greatly, changing the way they look at Computer Science, their peers, and themselves.The two last papers, Papers VII and VIII, investigate how researchers, teachers and students view concurrency. Most researchers/teachers claim that students have difficulties because of non-determinism, not understanding synchronization, etc. According to our results the students themselves do not seem to think that concurrency is significantly more difficult than any other subject. Actually most of them find concurrency to be both easy to understand and fun.