Is iteration really easier to learn than recursion for CS1 students?

  • Authors:

  • Claudio Mirolo

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Udine, Udine, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ninth annual international conference on International computing education research
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

There is general consensus that recursion is difficult to learn, which may be meant to imply that novice students are more at ease with iteration --- probably a widespread perception of students themselves. However, three years of investigation in a context where recursion is introduced earlier than iteration, as well as control experiments for a standard imperative-first introduction to programming, have provided no evidence that students make more progress with iteration than they do with recursion. More specifically, by means of a pair of questionnaires devised for this purpose, two research questions have been addressed. First, do the students who learned recursion before iteration actually exhibit a stronger ability to deal with the latter? Second, do the students of the imperative-first path master iteration better than those of the recursion-earlier path?