What is the Best Way to Teach Programming?

Please note: This part of the website is currently under construction

In our Lab, the main focus is to understand, identify and propose better ways for teaching programming to Computer Science students. To achieve this goal we work in three areas:

Understand Programming

To improve teaching practices, the first and the most important aspect is to understand how students understand programming. Programming is composed of several cognitive elements, including language comprehension, working memory, problems solving, and divided attention. Since understanding of programs is a cognitive process, we cannot observe it directly, hence we use indirect measurement approach. In our lab we use fMRI, EEG and Eye tracking.

Students work with several source code snippets while being inside an fMRI scanner to record active brain areas, which are linked to cognitive processes.