Student Perceptions of Resource Helpfulness

Abstract

What do students perceive as helpful when they learn to program? This paper presents the results of this question from a survey conducted with 125 students enrolled in two online introductory programming courses. The question asked students to rank a number of resources and activities that they used or completed in their course. The results show that students perceive lecture videos as the most helpful resource while syntax exercises were seen as the most helpful activity. The spread of the student responses would seem to indicate that a more thorough and widely completed investigation of student perceptions of resources and activities would be beneficial to the field of computer science education.