Abstract:

Global use of mobile devices and computers lead world to a never seen need of programmers. Informatics is almost everywhere, and a new world of applications is emerging.

However, to achieve programming skills those professionals must take a specific education and work hard to be able to develop software.

During time, the educational process of programming has been centred on formal activities on a physical classroom. On the last years world has also seen a significant change of the educational process with the appearance of Learning Management Systems (as Moodle).

On this paper we will describe a new paradigm of programming teaching that we are now implementing on an Engineering Informatics Course inside the School of Engineering of Polytechnic of Porto (ISEP).

We will explore some steps to implement a Moodle plugin named “Virtual Programming Lab” on our institution from the scratch (starting with formal communications and requirements identification) till the planning inside a course unit named APROG (Algorithmic and Programming) from the first year of the course.

We will describe some of the implemented activities that involved about 130 students, and several teachers on a pilot analysis and their preliminary results.
Some conclusions, considerations, recommendations and outcomes will be established for the second year of this pilot experience.

Keywords:

Programmers, teaching programming, algorithms, Moodle, Virtual Programming Lab.