At present, teaching programming to future teachers is superficial or is excluded from computer science curricular. Only programming fundamentals are taught during computer studies, and skills acquired during the training are not applied in practice. The aims of this article are (1) to develop a programming course for teacher training disciplines…

The first obstacles to overcome when a student has to face the task of programming for the first time are the abstraction level, the comprehension of a language with unfamiliar concepts for him/her and the specific syntax for each programming language. This work presents the qualitative results obtained in a study focused on the gain of skills for…

In psychology departments in South Africa, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) is routinely used for quantitative analysis. While SPSS has a user-friendly interface, it does not permit application of some of the more sophisticated analytic approaches and therefore has limited functionality. The programming language R can perform…

Teaching an introductory programming course to an average of 40 students while monitoring their performance can be a challenge for instructors. Preparing coding exercises with test cases and checking students' programs can prove to be time consuming at times. Moreover, programming has been known to be quite difficult for students to learn. To…

Software is an integral part of our lives. It controls the cars we drive every day, the ships we send into space, and even our toasters. It is everywhere and we can easily download more. Software solves many real-world problems and satisfies many needs. Thus, unsurprisingly, there is a rising demand for software engineers to maintain existing…