Ways To Write Algorithms And Their Execution Traces For Teaching Programming
Oleg A. Sychev · The European Proceedings of Social & Behavioural Sciences · 2021
Learning to read source code is an important part of developing programming skills. Using pseudo-code and program traces for this allows creating exercises developing comprehension of basic algorithmic concepts like control structures, expressions, functions calls. However, such assignments require reading long traces and comparing them with the algorithm, identifying the control structures involved. Automatic generation of algorithms for assessments poses a particular problem because such algorithms lack an identified goal. While this is useful for learning to predict program traces without relying on the intuitive understanding of the algorithm, it doesn't allow using meaningful labels for the control structures comprising the algorithm's tree. This paper presents a study of students' preferences between different ways of writing algorithms and program traces. Eighty-one first-year computer science students completed a survey comparing eight ways of writing algorithms and four ways of writing program traces. The students preferred using expressions to identify control structures over short phrases or numbers. They had no clear preferences for the way the program traces were formulated. So a system, generating algorithms for assessments should also have a module generating expressions. These results are limited to university students; the preferences of other groups of learners should be studied separately.