Difficulties in solving ill-defined problems: a case study with introductory computer programming students

Authors:
Andréa Mendonça;Clara de Oliveira;Dalton Guerrero;Evandro Costa
Affiliations:
Computing and System Department, Federal University of Campina Grande, Paraíba, Brazil;Informatics Department, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Santa Catarina, Brazil;Computing and System Department, Federal University of Campina Grande, Paraíba, Brazil;Computing and System Department, Federal University of Campina Grande, Paraíba, Brazil
Venue:
FIE'09 Proceedings of the 39th IEEE international conference on Frontiers in education conference
Year:
2009

Citing 6
Cited 1

A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students

ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
Case Studies for Method and Tool Evaluation

IEEE Software
Requirements engineering: closing the gap between academic supply and industry demand

Crossroads
Do students recognize ambiguity in software design? a multi-national, multi-institutional report

Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering
Can graduating students design software systems?

Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
RoboCode & problem-based learning: a non-prescriptive approach to teaching programming

Proceedings of the 11th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education

POPT: a problem-oriented programming and testing approach for novice students

Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper we report a case study carried out in the first academic semester of 2008 with novice programming students of the Computer Science Course at the Federal University of Campina Grande. This case study aimed at observing and evaluating strategies adopted by students on ill-defined problem solving. The results of this case study showed that students found it hard to perform problem statement exploratory reading and interpretation, formulate questions to enlighten the problem, analyze the problem constrains and error occurrence, write tests to check non-obvious situations and also to register effectively the new problem information acquired by discussing with client. The present paper also reports on some pedagogic possibilities to improve the Introductory Programming Teaching.