Brain-based Programming

Learning languages can be hard. As the yearly results of the course “Introduction to structured and object-based programming” at our university show, learning the first programming language might be even harder. Many students complain about the difficulty of the course and fail in the exam. With the desire to support the students and enhance the learning outcomes we initiated the project “Brain-based Programming”. The basic question is: “How can learning to program be made easier?” The answer may come from the interdisciplinary field of neurodidactics that offers many general suggestions for improving teaching and designing teaching material. But concrete examples for computer science education are scarce, and empirical research is still missing. This was the impetus for the project “Brain-based Programming” that aims at (1) creating and evaluating a brain-based script for beginners in Java programming and at (2) implementing and evaluating brain-based teaching methods in the programming course. In the pilot phase we conducted a didactic experiment in one of seven parallel groups and combined brain-based teaching methods and exercises. The results demonstrate the success of the experiment and support the hypothesis that learning is more effective when it considers how the brain learns and follows neurodidactical principles.