Learning Programming through Guess & Check

About the Project

By introducing lower fees and lower admission requirements, Daffodil International University, a recently established private university, has opened its doors to disadvantaged rural students in Bangladesh. As a result, over 70 percent of the current Computer Science and Engineering students come from rural background. Given their poorer study and communication skills, such students simply resort to memorizing and, as a result, have very weak programming skills even after four years of study. In the Computer Fundamentals course, therefore, a methodology that can best be described as “Guess and Check” is being applied. In each lesson, students are given a problem without teaching any computer commands or theory. They work in pairs or groups to guess answers. Their answers are then compared and classified. Subsequently, an almost correct solution is given. Students run the semi-correct solution, find the errors and correct the program. Despite a few initial setbacks, more than 70 percent of the students start to love this approach.

 

April 24, 2019 (last update 01-09-2021)