It is an acknowledged fact that many novice programmers experience difficulty in the process of learning to program. One of the contributing factors to this difficulty is the Program Development Environment (PDE). Professional-PDEs are those developed specifically for professional programmers, but are often used by educational institutions in the instruction of programming. It has long been accepted that such environments are inappropriate in the instruction of programming due to unnecessary complexity and lack of support for novice programmers in the learning process. Numerous pedagogical-PDEs supporting the mechanics of programming have been developed in response to this. A review of literature, however, indicates that very limited empirical studies comparing pedagogical-PDEs and professional-PDEs have been conducted. The current study investigates whether there are measurable benefits to using a pedagogical-PDE supporting the mechanics of programming in the instruction of programming instead of a professional-PDE. A comparative study of this nature requires a representative pedagogical-PDE and representative professional-PDE be compared with one another. The first part of the current study determines a set of requirements that a pedagogical- PDE should adhere to based on literature. A set of representative features for a pedagogical-PDE is derived by examining the features of existing PDEs in conjunction with the set of requirements. Based on these features, a pedagogical-PDE, known as SimplifIDE, is developed that implements the representative set of features and that meets are the requirements for a pedagogical-PDE. The second part of the current study is the specification and administration of an empirical experiment in which SimplifIDE and Borland© DelphiTM are compared with one another. A holistic approach in determining the differences between the PDEs is taken and three main areas are examined, namely academic performance, perceptions and programming behavior.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:nmmu/vital:10477 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Vogts, Dieter |
| Publisher | Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Faculty of Science |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Doctoral, DPhil |
| Format | xv, 205 pages, pdf |
| Rights | Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University |
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