Redundancy and syntax-late approaches in introductory programming courses

  • Authors:

  • Alessio Gaspar;Sarah Langevin;Naomi Boyer

  • Affiliations:

  • University of South Florida (USF), Lakeland, Florida;University of South Florida (USF), Lakeland, Florida;University of South Florida (USF), Lakeland, Florida

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This paper examines the impact on students of a redundant presentation of fundamental constructs (e.g. variables, data types, conditional, loops, etc) paired with the deferring of syntactical aspects exposure. This case study is based on the offerings of an undergraduate introductory programming course using the Java language for a fundamentals-first approach. We discuss several published approaches which have been successful in handling Java's less novice-friendly syntactical aspects and compare them to the idea of redundant introduction to essential programming constructs. We then present observations about the effect of our approach based on student data collected using various instruments; peer learning forums posts and statistics on students' syntactical errors.