Abstract:

Computer programming is one of the main subjects in the curriculum of undergraduate computer science students. To acquire computer programming, students need to gain algorithmic and logical thinking skills. It might be a long process and requires some consecutive steps, from recognizing the problems that can be solved using the given algorithms to developing complex algorithms. The first part of this article briefly describes what logical thinking and algorithmic thinking are. Next, we summarize seven levels of algorithmic thinking that students gradually acquire while they learn algorithmization and computer programming. In the following part of the paper, we describe our survey related to algorithmic and logical thinking. The survey was conducted in the academic year 2019/2020 at J. Selye University; in the assessment were involved 96 first-year and 44 second-year computer science students. The assignments contained sixteen tasks altogether: seven tasks related to the execution of given algorithms, three tasks associated with the analysis of algorithms, three tasks associated with the development of optimal algorithms, and three tasks related to problem-solving and logical thinking. The results, summarized in the next part of the paper, show that there are only slight differences in the scores of first- and second-year students. However, the results also show that students had the most difficulties with the tasks related to creating algorithms and developing the optimal algorithms for given problems. Finally, in the last part of the article, we draw our conclusions and mention our future research plans.

Keywords:

Teaching and learning programming, algorithmic thinking, logical thinking.