What is 'good' code? - Livestream

When learning to program, students are often most focused on how to write code that functions correctly??"yet many different code structures can have the same functionality while differing in how easy they are to understand or extend. Thus, helping students to understand how to write well-structured code is an important learning objective. In this talk, I’ll describe our research exploring students’ understanding of particular programming patterns (code structures).

Using a survey-based approach, we demonstrate that students’ understanding of programming patterns and anti-patterns is multi-faceted, and that, in some cases, relatively minor interventions can lead to large improvements in code structure. Over time, students do show improvement in their knowledge of programming patterns, but many students continue to prefer anti-patterns. We end by discussing implications for future research and potential classroom interventions.

Speaker: Anna Rafferty, Carleton College

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