Integrating Class and Laboratory with Hands-On Programming: Its Benefits and Challenges

The traditional approach of teaching programming courses is teachers centric where students are passive learners. Also for such courses, the laboratory and classes are conducted separately. This paper focuses on integrating classroom and laboratory with hands-on for programming course. This approach is student centric which brings in active learning. However it has been less researched area and adequate literature is not available on 'hands-on science' specifically for programming course. The work presented in this paper also extends from our previous work where debugging, code optimization and testing are emphasized. In the proposed approach each teaching session consisted of hands-on teaching and activities to support it. This requires strategic planning of the course and its delivery as discussed in the paper. Applying this approach, there is increase in the number of students scoring higher grades and overall improvement in the average. The paper also discusses the benefits and challenges of hands-on discovered in this case study that triggers further research.

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