A “light” application of blended extreme apprenticeship in teaching programming to students of mathematics

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse an application of the eXtreme Apprenticeship (XA) methodology, in a blended form, with a reduced set of human and software resources. The study was conducted at the University of Verona, in the context of the course “Programming with Laboratory” with 170 participants enrolled at the first degree in Applied Mathematics, throughout three different academic years. We analyse the earliest period of lessons, when the fundamentals of programming are introduced. During the first two years, students were trained with a traditional teaching method; the last group was trained using the XA teaching model. The outcomes showed a tangible improvement of learning outcomes in students trained with XA compared with the traditional teaching method. Possible refinements of XA method in our case study and in other educational contexts are discussed.