Identifying potential to acquire programming skill
Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM
A psychology of learning BASIC
Communications of the ACM
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A paradigmatic approach in teaching FORTRAN programming language has been successfully implemented in the past. The present paper summarizes the results of a pilot experiment conducted to verify the effectiveness of this approach among students. About seventy-five engineering students who took a course in FORTRAN using a paradigmatic approach were instructed to construct problems from their areas of specialization. The constructed problems were compared to the paradigms they had used and a similarity measure was introduced. The results were compared with a control group of the same number of students with the same background who had taken a standard FORTRAN class. A preliminary investigation shows that students who had been exposed to a paradigmatic approach were more successful in providing parallel problems from their areas of specialization than the students who used conventional methods. The implications and further studies needed are outlined at the end of the paper.