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• alan.dean - Apr 21 2007 | Learning

  A bunch of people have linked to this academic paper, which proposes a way to separate programming sheep from non-programming goats in computer science classes-- long before the students have ever touched a program or a programming language
• royleban - Mar 03 2007 | programming, science, education, psychology

  In 1984, when I was in graduate school, I participated in a psych study on programmers. The goal of the study was to gain insight into how people debug applications. The grad student running the study set up a program that didn't work properly, gave us all a development environment and an instruction sheet on how to use it (a few simple edit commands, plus a Run command). He told us the correct result from running the program. There was a pad of paper and a calculator taped down to the table and a designated pen we were supposed to use. The test was scheduled for 2 hours and was being videotaped. We were able to review the editor "cheat sheet" before the 2 hours started.

  He started the clock and I looked at the program. I ran it and saw the incorrect output that it gave. I then looked at the program and immediately spotted an off-by-one error in a loop which was consistent with the incorrect result. I changed it and ran the program again and got the correct result. Total elapsed time: less than 1 minute. I then spent the next five minutes examining every line in the program to make sure there were no additional bugs. There weren't, so I turned to the observer and said "It looks like it was just that single bug. What do I do now?" Sure enough, it was just the one bug.

  I was clearly on the fast side, but it turned out I wasn't alone. Since I was one of the later participants in his survey, I was able to ask him how it had gone so far. It turned out that every single person in his test fit into one of two categories: solved it in <10 minutes, or couldn't solve it at all, given the full 2 hours. There was nobody in between. Certainly an interesting result, but not what he was looking for. Unfortunately, I never saw his final paper, so I don't know what he ended up writing about.

  Quoted: All teachers of programming find that their results display a 'double hump'. It is as if there are two populations: those who can [program], and those who cannot [program], each with its own independent bell curve. Almost all research into programming teaching and learning have concentrated on teaching: change the language, change the application area, use an IDE and work on motivation. None of it works, and the double hump persists.

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• Derek