I teach novice programmers, and I'm concerned that so many of them fail. Why do most introductory programming courses have such high fail rates, and what can we do about it? I've been exploring these issues for some years now, and this talk is a summary of my various studies. The main study presented looks at three years worth of data on the kinds of problems that students have in programming laboratory work. Other studies, including one in progress, will be described more briefly. I don't have any revolutionary answers yet, but I think I'm at least starting to home in on some interesting questions.
Anthony Robins is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He completed his DPhil at the University of Sussex in 1989, and has worked at Otago ever since, with brief spells as a visiting researcher at Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and the University of Liège (Belgium). Most of his research explores neural network models of memory, but he also has interests in computer science education, teaching novice programmers and playing with Lego robots.