Time and Location

  • Date: Friday, October 31 (tentative)
  • Time: TBA
  • Location: TBA

Abstract

In this talk I describe a step-by-step translation process for loop construction that beginning programming students can follow. Loops in programming languages are difficult for beginning students to correctly construct. At their core, the idea is simple: repeat a given task until a condition is falsified. Loops, however, have multiple possible points of failure and opportunities for mistakes. Via a series of correctness-preserving transformations, students engage with an fully-mechanical translation pipeline that tries to removes many instances of failure and frustration when designing loops. We performed two evaluative studies on students from the CS1 and CS2 population at a large R1 midwestern university to test our methodology against the traditional approach to teaching loops in a second-semester computer science course. The first study emphasized translating tail recursive functions into loops. The second study, which builds upon the results from the first, moves students from a problem statement, a recursive function, then to its loop counterpart. The results from our first study indicate that our translation pipeline method improves students’ success in translating tail recursive functions to equivalent loops. The results of our second study indicate that more students appear to enjoy the presentation of the translation pipeline versus others’ attitudes toward the traditional means of learning loops. Combining these facts together can potentially imply that students who use the translation pipeline perform better at writing loops than those trained by traditional lectures.