August 5, 2013 at 1:40 am

Leo Porter, Charlie McDowell, Beth Simon, and I collaborated on a paper on how to make introductory programming work, now available in CACM. It’s a shorter, more accessible version of Leo and Beth’s best-paper-award winning SIGCSE 2013 paper, with history and kibitzing from Charlie and me :

Many Communications readers have been in faculty meetings where we have reviewed and bemoaned statistics about how bad attrition is in our introductory programming courses for computer science majors (CS1). Failure rates of 30%–50% are not uncommon worldwide. There are usually as many suggestions for how to improve the course as there are faculty in the meeting. But do we know anything that really works?

We do, and we have research evidence to back it up. Pair programming, peer instruction, and media computation are three approaches to reforming CS1 that have shown positive, measurable impacts. Each of them is successful separately at improving retention or helping students learn, and combined, they have a dramatic effect.