An Evaluation of the Constructive Teaching Methodology of Programming Concepts

In this paper we present the results from a class room setting based experiment to test the validity of the bottom up technique employed in teaching concepts in the domain of computer programming like branching, looping, nested looping, procedures, recursion, etc. Programming knowledge concepts are generally taught in an order of increasing complexity of comprehension, like branching before looping before recursion and so on. The null hypothesis is that with the knowledge of simpler concepts, students can then learn and apply increasingly complex concepts. We test this technique by asking students to review example LOGO programs and their corresponding correct outputs and then perform increasingly complex programming tasks which will require them to apply the acquired knowledge from the examples. It is expected that after reviewing complex programs the students too will be able to perform increasingly complex tasks thus demonstrating concept knowledge. The student performance on the tasks is measured by comparing the student generated program and the expert generated correct solution in terms of a parameter called cognitive complexity (CC). It is seen from the preliminary results that although students consistently learn and apply simpler concepts, they do not learn and apply complex concepts to solve tasks as often. Keywords-component; concept learning; LOGO; cognitive complexity;