Initial Experiences of Delivery Methods in a First Year Programming Course

The very first time that anyone is taught how to program, it is generally a difficult concept to come to grips with. With the advent of more advanced programming environments, such as Windows and eventdriven programming, the amount of overhead required to do even the more simple of tasks has become large. When teaching the first year programming course at UPE, it was decided to teach them using Delphi, but not to start off with event-driven programming. Instead, a more “traditional” non-event-driven style is used, namely console applications. The fundamental concepts of programming are taught without all the other unnecessary topics getting in the way. Even so, the programming environment of Delphi (and many other software development tools) in itself is complex. To see what sort of impact this had on student learning and understanding, two prototype systems were implemented; namely a simplified, bare-bones interface to Delphi, as well as an iconicprogramming tool that allowed students to create programs in a manner similar to flowcharts from which program code is generated. Different groups of students each used the different development tools (Delphi Enterprise, Delphi Lite and B#) when doing practicals and their results, experiences and performance are compared.