Programming Education

Introductory programming courses traditionally face high drop-out rates and poor performance and students often perceive learning to program as difficult. In our programming courses for non-computer science students (e.g Business Informatics, Business Administration), we are faced with additional challenges. We can observe high diversity among our students, for example, with respect to gender differences, cultural differences, educational background, or work experience. In our research we aim to overcome these challenges by investigating how heterogeneous groups of students can be best supported. We develop didactic concepts with accompanying teaching and learning material to actively support diversity in programming education. Our concepts include competence models for measuring competences and as a result support individual learning paths. Support for distance learning and flipped classroom methods are fundamental parts of our concept. The goal of our research is to support a flat learning curve in university programming courses for non-computer science students.