FACILITATING HOW TO LEARN ALGORITHMS AND COMPUTER PROGRAMMING

Abstract

Computing devices are increasingly present ineveryday objects and activities, this makes computerprogramming an essential issue for modern Engineering.The importance and complexity of this issue has motivatedthe research on educational methods to facilitate thelearning of this subject. However, current methods have, ingeneral, the following drawbacks: (1) they expect a learnerable to formulate strategies for solving problems even infields not know properly; (2) the used languages haveabstract primitives, distant from the concepts belonging tothe areas where the solutions are formulated. In this paper,we present a method for learning algorithms that exposesthe student to different problems spaces, each one with itsown formal language. These problems spaces evolvegradually: from small to large spaces, from concrete toabstract spaces, from specific to generic language. We alsopresent a software developed and some results in classroomof Engineering and Computer Science.Index Terms ⎯ Algorithms and Programming Learning,Computer Science Education, Engineering Education.