Karen Petrie, University of DundeeTeaching Students how to Teach Themselves

Our Challenge• Computing moves incredibly quickly• Programming languages move on• We need to teach students how to learn new

programming languages– Not just what is currently in vogue

Ideally

• Two weeks with a good textbook and a compiler, should be enough for them to be proficient in any language.

How Difficult is this?

• Imagine you have spent all of your life in one area of the UK, you know one dialect of English.

• Now you time travel to Shakespearean England.

• How easy would it be to communicate?

Programming• This is about how difficult it is to change from one

programming language to another

Apart from....

• People speaking Shakespearean English are likely to be a lot more helpful than a computer

• Computers require you to type in precisely the correct language!

Curriculum• In1st year we concentrate on teaching

students to programme for the 1st time. – JAVA

• In 2nd year we concentrate on building these programming skills and learning new languages– C– C++

Links• There are links between JAVA and C++– Same keywords

• C++ is a superset of C• We want students to see these links and work

out how to use them to learn languages• This has been added as a learning outcome of

the 2nd year module

Approach• Teach the new language conventionally

through lectures and practicals– We are trying to get students to spot and

use the connections to previous languages for themselves

• Introduced tutorial for this purpose

Weekly Tutorial• After lectures, but before practical session• Small groups of 5 students• Each student has to write-up a blog post of 2

tutorial discussions, worth 5% each– Meaning at the end the group has a blog

spanning the whole course (10 weeks)• Students loose 1% for every week they do not

attend

Tutorial Content• For every concept you have learnt this week,

discuss how it differs from previous languages you have learned.

• Are there any overlaps between your courses this week?

In the Discussion and Blog Posts

• All students found connections• The easiest ones to find were when the

concepts are the same or similar• Surprisingly, students struggled the most

when concepts were completely different• More successful students dug a bit deeper

and discussed the connections in more detail

Exam Question• Students were given a snippet of JAVA code,

they had to write in both C++ and C. • They then had to compare in detail all three

sets of code• The final question was: How can studying the

differences between syntax and semantics in small code snippets (such as the exercise above) aid in learning new languages?

Results• This exam question was the best answered

question in the exam in 2011 and 2nd best in 2012• The 2011 group all passed Games Programming in

2012.– Many of them taught themselves a new language

to do so.