A study on basic mathematics knowledge for the enhancement of programming learning skills
Authors
Ana Isabel Nobre de Brito de Almeida Pacheco
Anabela Jesus Gomes
Joana Gomes Henriques
Ana Maria Carvalho de Almeida
Antonio Jose Mendes
Anabela Jesus Gomes
Joana Gomes Henriques
Ana Maria Carvalho de Almeida
Antonio Jose Mendes
Abstract
Novice students often find it difficult to learn to program. This translates in high failure and dropout rates that are often felt by teachers and discussed in the literature. According to our own experience as teachers we believe that student basic mathematical knowledge may have a positive effect on their ability to learn programming. The paper presents a study that involved a small number of Mathematics students enrolled in an introductory programming course who showed deep difficulties in programming learning. The study tried to evaluate if the lack of mathematical knowledge was a main cause for the students' difficulties or if the problems were mainly caused by programming specific issues.Keywords
CS1 programming, Learning difficulties, Mathematics background, Problem solving, Programming learningSubject
Computer Science EducationConference
Informatics Education Europe III - IEEIII08, December 2008Cited by
Year 2010 : 3 citations
”Studies and proposals about initial programming learning”, A. Gomes e A.J. Mendes, Proceedings IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, pp. S3F-1–S3F-6, 2010.
”A study on student performance in first year CS courses”, A. Gomes e A.J. Mendes, Proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference on Innovation and technology in compu- ter science education, ACM, Ankara, Turquia, pp. 113–117, 2010.
Anabela Jesus Gomes and António José Mendes. 2010. A study on student performance in first year CS courses. In Proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 113-117. DOI=10.1145/1822090.1822123 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1822090.1822123