Reflections on the Teaching of Programming

Abstract

Software development is a complex area and extensive practice and reflection is required in order to obtain a good understanding of the different tasks involved in going from idea to deliverable software. To help in providing this understanding, we have developed a team programming course based on extreme programming and a coaching course. We discuss how these courses affect the curriculum, the design of the courses, and our experience from running them for four years, involving over 100 students per year. We also discuss how we have used the extreme programming approach to support the learning cycle through the use of iterative learning, peer learning and a fixed-time budget. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.