The teaching of introductory computer programming seems far from successful, with many first-year students performing more poorly than expected. One possible reason for this is that novices hold "non-viable" mental models (internal explanations of how something works) of key programming concepts which then cause misconceptions and difficulties. An…

In view of the strong growth of transnational education programmes in Australian universities, there is growing interest in the experiences of students participating in such programmes. This article reports on the perceived student satisfaction with several aspects of their transnational programmes, including instructors, technology, and programme…

Students with a semester or more of instruction often display remarkable naivety about the language that they have been studying and often prove unable to manage simple programming problems. The main purpose of this study was to create a set of problem-plan-program types for the BASIC programming language to help high school students build plans…

This article describes research on the learning of object-oriented programming (OOP) by novices. During two academic years, we taught OOP to high school students, using Java and BlueJ. Our approach to teaching featured: objects-first, teaching composed classes relatively early, deferring the teaching of main methods, and focusing on class…