Observations of student competency in a CS1 course

Authors:
Janet Rountree;Nathan Rountree;Anthony Robins;Robert Hannah
Affiliations:
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand;University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand;University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand;University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Venue:
ACE '05 Proceedings of the 7th Australasian conference on Computing education - Volume 42
Year:
2005

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Abstract

Two issues of related interest are investigated in this paper. The first issue is associated with the statement that "Learning to program is a key objective in most introductory computing courses, yet many computing educators have voiced concern over whether their students are learning the necessary programming skills in those courses" (McCracken et al. 2001). The second issue considers which task CS1 students find more difficult: code generation or code comprehension. To investigate this, we analysed our CS1 course results in terms of laboratory exercises, comprehension, generation, factual/conceptual, and multiple-choice exam questions. Contrary to our initial expectations, the code comprehension and generation skills of our students appear to be tracking each other.