A structured approach to problem solving in CS1

Programming teaching is a complex task, mainly because of the students’ difficulties on building structured solutions and also on problems interpretation. At introductory courses, we need to develop on students, programming skills to help them to apply their knowledge effectively on solving problems. This led us to use an approach that will be followed from the problem presentation until the development of a properly structured program. Its application in CS1/2, which we have taught in recent years, allowed an increase in approval rating and in the quality of the solutions presented, it also has proved to be adapted to the needs of teaching programming with different imperative programming languages. In this work we illustrate the approach with a simple example. We also present an evaluation of the methodology done with a population of 130 students at introductory courses using C and Java languages.

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