Abstract:

As a common interest, computer science and programming courses are being added to various curricula. However, for some IT and non-IT students learning to program is a challenge. The students cite apparent reasons such as difficulties with memorising programming language syntax, writing clean code without errors, designing programs to certain tasks, understanding the logic of a large program. To make learning easier, course instructors are constantly developing alternative approaches and materials. For example, it has been found that exercises with questions, answers or solutions as well as sample programs may help undergraduates to learn programming.

This article addresses an object-oriented programming course for first-year undergraduate students at the University of Tartu. The course is based on Java and consists of two forms of teaching: lectures and workshops. We have integrated the flipped classroom approach into the workshops. The students have to read the workshop material and solve some exercises before the class. Some students claim that they cannot complete these exercises because studying the material at home leads to questions and problems. This paper introduces so-called "troubleshooters" which were provided for every programming exercise in the course with 289 students given in 2020. The "troubleshooter" is a help system structured as a decision tree that supports finding solutions to problems. It contains answers and clues to the questions which may arise on a particular exercise.

In this study, we have conducted a survey on students' opinions about the troubleshooters. Additional data have been gathered from the learning analytics integrated into the troubleshooters' environment. Troubleshooters were used by around 80% of those who answered the questionnaire. Only 1 percent of the respondents did not find the troubleshooters helpful at all. The rest of the students indicated that the troubleshooters reduced the need for asking for help from the instructor, encouraged to do the homework exercises and contributed to the completion of the course.

Keywords:

Undergraduate programming education, troubleshooting system.