From Problems to Programs: A Pattern Language to Go from Problem Requirements to Solution Schemas in Elementary Programming.
Jose Manuel Burgos-Ortiz, Javier Galve-Frances, Julio García-Martín · 2000
The From Problems to Programs pattern language is an intent to formalize to a certain extent, via patterns, the programming process to go from the problem to the program. It outlines a common instructional framework to categorize, specify and solve the problems commonly taught in an introductory programming course. The language helps those educators interested on an organization of information for teaching a programming course which puts primary interest on the structure of and relationships between a problem, a program and a solution schema. The language can also help to see how formal specification concepts are related with programming. In the usual “syntax-driven ” approach to programming instruction, problems are introduced as examples needed to explain a syntactic feature and solutions are presented as completed programs that solve the problems. Thus this collection of unrelated problems and last-version programs is the material that students handle to solve new problems. This course organization does not promote knowledge integration [2] as it does not show how problems are related to each other, neither how problems are related to programming language constructs [6] nor how is the “continuum ” to go from the problem to the program along the programming process. A very small deal of attention is given to the skills that an expert programmer handles to develop a program [7], starting from the problem as goals and going to the