Teaching Code Quality in High School Programming Courses - Understanding Teachers’ Needs

The introduction of computer programming into schools has meant that many teachers who are not trained in Computer Science are expected to become familiar with computing concepts and techniques. For senior high school programming students studying text-based programming, one key concept is code quality. Code quality has many aspects, for example, relating to usability, security and maintainability. Our goal for this study was to investigate teachers’ needs when teaching code quality, with a focus on the maintainability aspect. We wanted to know how we might support their teaching. This was motivated by a reported gap in resources suitable for teachers. We interviewed twenty teachers throughout New Zealand (NZ). We found that many teachers are struggling with teaching code quality in general and would like additional resources focused on quality, for example, simple examples and definitions. The contributions of the paper are the understanding that teachers do not distinguish between the various quality aspects and the highlighting of a teachers’ perspective on the resources that would benefit them most when teaching code quality to senior programming students. This poses a challenge to the research community to provide such resources for teachers.