Why Is Teaching Programming Difficult?

Abstract

Teaching 1st year programming is a major challenge at all universities. It doesn’t seem to matter what programming language is used, how much support is provided to the students, or how the students are assessed, or at which university the teaching and learning takes place. Learning to program is hard enough as it is (Pine, in Learn to program. The Pragmatic Programmers, 2009). Given that an A level in Computer Studies is still not a prerequisite for admission to a course teaching computer programming although A level Mathematics often is. We look at a number of issues around the difficulties of learning to program, the vast change in the nature of programming language concepts, libraries and application areas, and ask the question, are expectations of beginner programmers realistic given the short amount of time given to learning to program?