Abstract:

In computer courses, logical reasoning is essential for understanding the structure of a computer system and for problem solving. The challenge is to provide a teaching and learning environment that enables students to understand this new paradigm of reasoning. Programming competitions are commonly considered educational methodologies capable of instigating students' critical thinking and curiosity, as well as developing teamwork skills, creative thinking and self-guided learning. The programming marathon is one of the most widespread programming competitions. This activity enables students to solve computational problems through programming skills. In general, competition problems are presented to students by complex problem statements that require reading comprehension. Students must then to implement the algorithm to solve the proposed problem using a high level programming language. However, this competition approach requires programming skills that are still distant from beginning students who are developing their logical reasoning. For this reason, participation in competitions is generally restricted to experienced students. In order to anticipate student participation in these activities, a programming competition approach based on the algorithm interpretation is presented. Problems are presented to students through executable programs that running from terminal. The algorithm interpretation requires the execution of different input data to generate the program outputs. The available programs have the least possible interaction with the user, which requires the student to investigate the operation of the implemented algorithm. After interpreting the algorithm, students should construct the pseudocode of it. The developed pseudocode is then submitted to the virtual learning environment for evaluation by the teacher. If the algorithm is equivalent to the one implemented by the executable program, the pseudocode is considered correct. The proposed approach was applied in the laboratory discipline for the first year of the Computer Science course. The results showed that the activity was considered attractive by the students. Finally, it was observed that the proposed approach was able to increase students' awareness of the importance of testing the programs.

Keywords:

Programming competition, Algorithm interpretation, Executable program, Pseudocode.