Toward more effective strategies in teaching programming for novice students

This work reports two different approaches in teaching an introductory level computer programming course to first-year undergraduate students in a small liberal arts university. The first approach, task-specific design strategy, is a simplified teaching method to help students solving large problems. The second approach, teaching programming using graphical language, is a method to enhance students´ understanding on programming terminologies. The overall evaluation of the course showed the teaching methods are beneficial and effective, especially for students with limited background in computing and programming. Further, students´ feedback conducted at the end provide us with potential improvements for the future.