WIP: Skip the Lecture: A Decoding First Approach to Introductory Computing Education
David Zabner, Trevion Henderson · 2024
Existing research suggests introductory computer programming courses (i.e., CS1) constitute a significant barrier for students' entry into computer science and related disciplines.For example, extant literature suggests as high as 33% of students fail or drop out of introductory computer programming courses [1], precluding these students from pursuing computer science education in college.The purpose of this work in progress is twofold.First, we describe the development and implementation of a pedagogical approach to computing education that draws and expands on the Use-Modify-Create (UMC) framework [2, 3] to support students' learning in introductory computer programming courses.Second, drawing on unique qualitative data sources, such as student-produced lists of Python's rules, students' code annotations produced during the "use" phase of UMC, and ethnographic fieldnotes, we describe our pilot of a mixed-methods study examining students' sense-making, competency, and computing self-efficacy.Our preliminary examination of rules notebooks indicated that some students developed code tracing strategies and that most were able to discover many of the rules that underlie Python's runtime execution.