Explicando el bajo nivel de programación de los estudiantes

Résumé

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 parame- ter passing, lacking understanding of the object orien- ted paradigm, etc. This work shows examples of these problems and analyses their causes. We deduce that the applied tea- ching/learning process is somewhat responsible. We construct an explanation based on present psychologi- cal theories on mental and conceptual models. We noti- ce that low-level details are omitted or simplified when programming is taught. Hence, we formulate a hypot- hesis: 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. Ha- ving only 4Mhz and 64KB of RAM, they are forced to improve their code to leverage resources. Evidences show that students’ awareness was developed. Howe- ver, evidences are not enough to validate the hypothe- sis. Considering its educative relevance, we encourage getting more evidences to evaluate the hypothesis.