The role of extreme Apprenticeship in enhancing educational background effect on performance in programming

Abstract

Informatics is included in school education since many years, but its teaching is developed in many different ways depending on the country, the regional school curricula, and also the local didactic choices. As a result, students start their college studies with very heterogeneous groundings in the subject. Some of these students can encounter significant difficulties in the initial study of programming, especially in non-vocational curricula. In this paper, we consider the first-year students of a degree in Applied Mathematics. We investigate the relations among their background and the difficulties of learning how to program, also connected with the specific teaching methodology.