University Faculty Perceptions of Core Concepts in Introductory Programming Courses

Abstract

Selecting the basic concepts that should be presented in a first-year university course on programming is essential for planning the course and structuring the rest of the curriculum, along with other aspects such as the programming paradigm and the language used. This work reports an exploratory analysis of the syllabi of first programming courses at Spanish universities with the highest number of students enrolled in computer engineering. Using the list of the most frequent concepts, we designed a survey in which expert instructors were asked to identify essential, optional, and unnecessary concepts, as well as to indicate the perceived difficulty of each concept. More than fifty instructors from different universities participated in the study. The results reveal broad consensus on a core set of fundamental concepts in an introductory programming course and highlight those that, according to faculty perceptions, present greater learning difficulty for students. These findings provide a basis for building a map of concepts showing how they relate to one another, helping students to detect gaps in their knowledge and identify learning challenges.