Explicando el bajo nivel de programación de los estudiantes

Laburpena

During latest years we have appreciated a decay in the quality of fourth-year student's code. Whenever they are asked to develop complete systems from scratch, their code shows ground problems: spaghetti code, bad structuring, unnecessary repetitions, deficient parameter passing, lacking understanding of the object oriented paradigm, etc. This work shows examples of these problems and analyses their causes. We deduce that the applied teaching/learning process is somewhat responsible. We construct an explanation based on present psychological theories on mental and conceptual models. We notice that low-level details are omitted or simplified when programming is taught. Hence, we formulate a hypothesis: students are miss-modelling low-level concepts. In order to confront students with the problem and develop conciousness, we organized \#CPCRetroDev: a videogame developing contest for Amstrad CPC. Having only 4Mhz and 64KB of RAM, they are forced to improve their code to leverage resources. Evidences show that students' awareness was developed. However, evidences are not enough to validate the hypothesis. Considering its educative relevance, we encourage getting more evidences to evaluate the hypothesis.