Psychology and practicality of teaching programming

Software	None
Covers	Psychology of learning and problem solving, key concepts in software development
Skills Required	Good understanding of programming, interest in psychology
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ? Programming

Brief Description

There has been a lot of research over the last four decades on how people learn to program, how people learn to understand or misunderstand some of the core ideas in software development, and how some of these ideas and skills can be taught effectively. But little of this work has had much effect on the actual practice of teaching programming and software development.

The challenge of this project is to investigate what research has found out about how to learn and teach programming and other aspects of software development, how and why this research has and has not been applied to teaching, and how more use could be made of it to improve teaching.

Variants

This project could be focused on the psychology of programming itself, in which case it might be good to focus tightly on a limited range of aspects of programming. Alternately, it could be focused on the social and financial issues involved in making use of research in teaching and curriculum development. Another possible focus would be on the use of intelligent tutoring systems and other computer aided learning tools for teaching programming.

Back to