Codewitz: producing interactive elearning material for beginners in programming

ABSTRACT

The students of basic programming courses encounter often very serious learning problems. This is mostly due to the fact that even basic programming concepts and structures are abstract and need to be understood before a student can learn more practical issues. If these concepts remain hidden for the students they tend to drop out or finish the course with low marks when trying to learn more advanced concepts without the basic knowledge. To avoid the drop out problem there has to be an effective way to help the students with difficulties during the first steps of programming studies. It is a fact that there hardly ever exists any extra resource for these students. With interactive material the students can try by themselves to reach such level of skills to be able to learn more.Codewitz-project was set up to try to correct this problem in basic programming courses. The basic idea of the project is based upon the idea of sharing. There are three main goals in this project:Developing and producing interactive material for basic programming coursesImplementing a material bank for storing and sharing the resource with the project partnersCreating a functioning network of experts who deal with this problem every day.This demonstration will illustrate the idea of the material, the production process and the use of it. The project is open to any institution interested in taking part in the development work. The project website: http://www.codewitz.net.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features

General Terms:
Languages, Theory

Keywords:
basic programming, program code visualization, programming examples