Abstract:

Given that programming skills are in high demand in the labor market, higher education institutions need to meet those requirements to adequately teach their students how to acquire them as effectively as possible, whether live or online teaching. In addition, software development companies highly value individuals who bring knowledge from educational institutions they use in their daily work and do not have to teach it. Therefore, the authors decided to adapt to the pandemic restriction's requirements and circumstances and develop their methodology to maximize student's opportunities to learn and develop. According to the author's experience, it has been shown that classical teaching of programming using exclusively "ex-cathedra" approaches with Powerpoint presentations and slides did not always result in the best results. It was shown through the obtained grades and the acquired knowledge. This paper describes a proposal for a methodology for teaching programming skills in the case of conducting online classes when it is not possible to conduct live classes. The described methodology aims to acquaint students with the basic concepts of planning, critical thinking, decision making, design, and program code optimization. Particular emphasis is placed on acquiring skills that facilitate the development of young developers, gaining new experiences that make them more efficient in the future and striving to write software solutions based on the concepts of simplicity, maximum reusability, and clean code. Pair programming approaches, in which the professor live codes and students participate in giving suggestions, commenting, and sharing ideas, have also been used, as they have proven to be good in practice according to the author's experience. Code debugging is also significantly covered and used in the proposed methodology. It forms the backbone of gaining the independence of young programmers, which guarantees them career advancement after graduation and gaining self-confidence crucial to excellence in the future. At the end of the paper, a review on the use of methodology is given and future development on it.

Keywords:

Programming skills, online teaching, methodology.