Developing students’ code style skills
Yuliia Prokop, Olena Trofymenko, Оlexander Zadereyko · 2023
Developing the skills of writing clean code in novice programmers is an urgent and essential task for today’s university teachers. Despite numerous studies of this problem, the optimal solution has not yet been found. The research examines the motivation of students to adhere to the code style without any particular methodological influence. It is shown that students with an average of 2.2 years of programming experience understand code style rules and say they are ready to follow them. However, their code contains numerous style errors, which indicate the need for additional pedagogical efforts. In the second part of the study, we present the results of the experiment with another group of students. We applied the method of penalizing students for violating code style requirements, and it showed a positive impact: the total number of errors decreased. Optimistic results were obtained for many criteria. However, the same approach should be applied in subsequent courses to consolidate a positive impact. The paper proposes a method for developing students’ code style skills.