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Annual Conference of the Southern African Computer Lecturers' Association

SACLA 2018: ICT Education pp 143–157Cite as

Contextualisation of Abstract Programming Concepts for First Year IT Students: A Reflective Study

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Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 963))

Abstract

Higher education in South Africa must be transformed. An important dimension that can be addressed in the short term, yet will still have a significant positive impact, is the enrichment of courses with relevant content that resonates with students, i.e. to contextualise the study material. This paper focuses on enrichment of a specific introductory information technology (IT) programming course that is taught to first year students at a South African university. This course is problematic as the students fail to grasp the abstract programming concepts that are crucial for higher-order learning. They can then not apply these concepts practically; this is crucial for them so that they can become good programmers. We applied the soft systems methodology, as a reflective practice, to explore the perspectives of the students, so as to enable incorporation thereof in the teaching material and as such contextualise the material. The outcome of this study is contextualised examples and metaphors relating to the key abstract concepts that will be applied in class.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For comparison see [8] on algorithms and recipes.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Information Systems, North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa

    Carin Venter & Tanja Eksteen

Authors
  1. Carin Venter
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  2. Tanja Eksteen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tanja Eksteen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Salah Kabanda

  2. Computer Science, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa

    Hussein Suleman

  3. University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Stefan Gruner

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Venter, C., Eksteen, T. (2019). Contextualisation of Abstract Programming Concepts for First Year IT Students: A Reflective Study. In: Kabanda, S., Suleman, H., Gruner, S. (eds) ICT Education. SACLA 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 963. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05813-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05813-5_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05812-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05813-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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