Abstract
Teaching 1st year programming is a major challenge at all universities. It doesn’t seem to matter what programming language is used, how much support is provided to the students, or how the students are assessed, or at which university the teaching and learning takes place. Learning to program is hard enough as it is (Pine, in Learn to program. The Pragmatic Programmers, 2009). Given that an A level in Computer Studies is still not a prerequisite for admission to a course teaching computer programming although A level Mathematics often is. We look at a number of issues around the difficulties of learning to program, the vast change in the nature of programming language concepts, libraries and application areas, and ask the question, are expectations of beginner programmers realistic given the short amount of time given to learning to program?
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
En.wikipedia.org (2018) Ruby (programming language). [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language). Accessed 17 June 2018
Joy B (2002) Microsoft’s blind spot. cnet.com. Retrieved 12 Jan 2010
Krishna R (2018) Intro to agile under 5 minutes. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2hDKpgzdIE. Accessed 17 June 2018
Nevevs J, Hillman N (2018) The student academic experience survey report. [online] Higher Education Academy. Available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/student-academic-experience-survey-report-2018. Accessed 21 June 2018
News Center (2015) Among teens, sleep deprivation an epidemic. [online] Available at: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/10/among-teens-sleep-deprivation-an-epidemic.html. Accessed 17 June 2018
Pine C (2009) Learn to program, 2nd edn. The Pragmatic Programmers, ISBN 978-1-93435-636-4
The Verge (2018) MIT brings Google App Inventor back from the dead as open-source project. [online] Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/21/2723656/google-app-inventor-open-souce-code-released-by-mit. Accessed 16 June 2018
Thunkable Thoughts—The How and Why You Would Make Your Own Beautiful App (2018a) Thunkable Thoughts—The How and Why You Would Make Your Own Beautiful App. [online] Available at: https://blog.thunkable.com. Accessed 16 June 2018
Thunkable Thoughts—The How and Why You Would Make Your Own Beautiful App (2018b) Mark Friedman, Cofounder of App Inventor, Joins Thunkable!. [online] Available at: https://blog.thunkable.com/mark-friedman-founder-of-app-inventor-joins-thunkable-ee3f130a2835. Accessed 17 June 2018
YouTube (2018) Introduction to scrum—7 minutes. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TycLR0TqFA. Accessed 17 June 2018
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McDonald, C. (2018). Why Is Teaching Programming Difficult?. In: Carter, J., O'Grady, M., Rosen, C. (eds) Higher Education Computer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98590-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98590-9_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-98589-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-98590-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)