Pattern Census: A Characterization of Pattern Usage in Early Programming Courses
Vighnesh Iyer, Craig Zilles
Abstract
Expert programmers rarely think at the syntactic level. Instead, they think at higher levels of abstraction, mentally "chunking" groups of syntactic elements into a single abstraction. Explicitly teaching common "chunks" in early programming courses has been proposed in the research literature using the term "pattern-oriented instruction", but this practice appears not to be emphasized, nor is there a consensus about which patterns to teach or in what order.
Topics & Concepts
Computer scienceChunking (psychology)AbstractionProgramming languageTerm (time)Artificial intelligenceNatural language processingEpistemologyPhilosophyPhysicsQuantum mechanicsTeaching and Learning ProgrammingSoftware Engineering ResearchEvolutionary Algorithms and Applications