Why do students take programming modules?
Paul Curzon, Janet Rix · 1998
Programming jobs are increasingly scarce and yet an increasing number of students are taking IT and computing courses containing programming. It may therefore be that many will never need to write programs themselves. Instead the knowledge and skills may be primarily of indirect use in other IT areas. If being able to program is not the ultimate objective of students taking such modules, then the aims and objectives of curriculum developers may need to be changed accordingly. In this paper, we investigate the motivations that University students have for taking programming modules, and look at how those motivations change over time.