Three views on motivation and programming

Abstract

OVERVIEW Teaching programming is one of the most widely studied areas in computing education. Part of the reason for this may be the difficulty students experience when learning programming which makes it a challenging endeavor for instructors. There is a relationship between student motivation and success in learning to program [1], and motivation is also important in the bigger picture for computing educators, having inspired two ITiCSE working groups [2]. What is perhaps surprising is that motivation does not play an equal role in the various subfields of programming education.