TY - GEN
T1 - Pattern Census
T2 - 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE 2021
AU - Iyer, Vighnesh
AU - Zilles, Craig
N1 - Funding Information:
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DUE-1915257.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/3/3
Y1 - 2021/3/3
N2 - Expert programmers rarely think at the syntactic level. Instead, they think at higher levels of abstraction, mentally "chunking"groups of syntactic elements into a single abstraction. Explicitly teaching common "chunks"in early programming courses has been proposed in the research literature using the term "pattern-oriented instruction", but this practice appears not to be emphasized, nor is there a consensus about which patterns to teach or in what order. In this paper, we explore the set of patterns that students are expected to learn, independent of whether they are taught explicitly or must learn implicitly. Specifically, we studied the instructor solutions to homework and exams from 12 introductory CS courses from nine universities, identifying the presence of 15 patterns throughout the semester. We present results about the relative frequency of the patterns and the order in which the patterns tend to be introduced.
AB - Expert programmers rarely think at the syntactic level. Instead, they think at higher levels of abstraction, mentally "chunking"groups of syntactic elements into a single abstraction. Explicitly teaching common "chunks"in early programming courses has been proposed in the research literature using the term "pattern-oriented instruction", but this practice appears not to be emphasized, nor is there a consensus about which patterns to teach or in what order. In this paper, we explore the set of patterns that students are expected to learn, independent of whether they are taught explicitly or must learn implicitly. Specifically, we studied the instructor solutions to homework and exams from 12 introductory CS courses from nine universities, identifying the presence of 15 patterns throughout the semester. We present results about the relative frequency of the patterns and the order in which the patterns tend to be introduced.
KW - CS1
KW - pattern-oriented instruction
KW - patterns
KW - plans
KW - schema
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85103333981&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85103333981&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3408877.3432442
DO - 10.1145/3408877.3432442
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85103333981
T3 - SIGCSE 2021 - Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
SP - 45
EP - 51
BT - SIGCSE 2021 - Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 13 March 2021 through 20 March 2021
ER -