Toward more effective strategies in teaching programming for novice students

This work reports two different approaches in teaching an introductory level computer programming course to first-year undergraduate students in a small liberal arts university. The first approach, task-specific design strategy, is a simplified teaching method to help students solving large problems. The second approach, teaching programming using graphical language, is a method to enhance students' understanding on programming terminologies. The overall evaluation of the course showed the teaching methods are beneficial and effective, especially for students with limited background in computing and programming. Further, students' feedback conducted at the end provide us with potential improvements for the future.