A Tool to Help Learning Programming

Abstract

Learning to program is a task that requires previous knowledge to carry it out successfully. In general, it is easier for people with previous studies in mathematics and logic. When a teacher is preparing a programming course, she/he must take into account the previous knowledge of the students who are going to take the course. Given that some students can learn more easily than others, it is interesting to make available to the people in the second group means and materials that facilitate the acquisition of knowledge. This work is related to the teaching-learning process of the fundamentals of programming in a university Degree whose students have very varied previous knowledge. This makes learning the basic concepts of programming difficult for some of the students, who must dedicate their time to two global tasks: developing the ability to propose solutions to computer problems and learning to use a programming language to be able to represent said solutions. Students who have more difficulty tackling both tasks should focus on the first, since the second task is useless if the student does not know how to propose solutions to the problems. This work describes a tool designed to help students in this purpose. Thanks to this tool, the student can focus their efforts on defining solutions to computational problems and then use the tool to obtain the program that encodes a solution.