Teaching Programming Fundamentals to Modern University Students

In this paper we investigate how teaching programming to the modern generation of students, “digital natives” who grew up with Google and Facebook and do not know the world before the Internet, can be improved through a highly visual game-like approach. Many programming teachers report that modern programming students have short attention span, lack concentration and have poor motivation to learn programming. We show how we were able to improve the motivation of students and their marks by changing the study program so that the entire entry-level programming course (Programming Fundamentals) is being taught using a visual set of in-class examples and assignments. The paper presents a set of successful teaching patterns that helped to convert one of the most hated subjects in our school into a subject that many students loved and were able to master. The corresponding statistics suggests that one of the key achievements of our approach is a dramatic change in students’ motivation to learn programming, which has resulted a significant improvement in their overall results and was noticeable in the follow-up subjects.