Karen Petrie, University of Dundee Teaching Students how to Teach Themselves

Our Challenge Computing moves incredibly quickly Programming languages move on We need to teach students how to learn new programming languages – Not just what is currently in vogue

Ideally Two weeks with a good textbook and a compiler, should be enough for them to be proficient in any language.

How Difficult is this? Imagine you have spent all of your life in one area of the UK, you know one dialect of English. Now you time travel to Shakespearean England. How easy would it be to communicate?

Programming This is about how difficult it is to change from one programming language to another

Apart from.... People speaking Shakespearean English are likely to be a lot more helpful than a computer Computers require you to type in precisely the correct language!

Curriculum In1 st year we concentrate on teaching students to programme for the 1st time. – JAVA In 2 nd year we concentrate on building these programming skills and learning new languages – C – C++

Links There are links between JAVA and C++ – Same keywords C++ is a superset of C We want students to see these links and work out how to use them to learn languages This has been added as a learning outcome of the 2nd year module

Approach Teach the new language conventionally through lectures and practicals – We are trying to get students to spot and use the connections to previous languages for themselves Introduced tutorial for this purpose

Weekly Tutorial After lectures, but before practical session Small groups of 5 students Each student has to write-up a blog post of 2 tutorial discussions, worth 5% each – Meaning at the end the group has a blog spanning the whole course (10 weeks) Students loose 1% for every week they do not attend

Tutorial Content For every concept you have learnt this week, discuss how it differs from previous languages you have learned. Are there any overlaps between your courses this week?

In the Discussion and Blog Posts All students found connections The easiest ones to find were when the concepts are the same or similar Surprisingly, students struggled the most when concepts were completely different More successful students dug a bit deeper and discussed the connections in more detail

Exam Question Students were given a snippet of JAVA code, they had to write in both C++ and C. They then had to compare in detail all three sets of code The final question was: How can studying the differences between syntax and semantics in small code snippets (such as the exercise above) aid in learning new languages?

Results This exam question was the best answered question in the exam in 2011 and 2nd best in 2012 The 2011 group all passed Games Programming in – Many of them taught themselves a new language to do so.