Project-based Iterative Teaching Model for Introductory Programming Course

Introductory programming courses are considered to be the most important courses taught to undergraduate computer science students. However, teaching these courses in the best way possible has always been difficult. Mostly, students are unable to form the relation between the theory and the practical work. Thus, they find it difficult to put their skills to use, when they are required. This has been a centre of discussion among educational researchers for quite a long time. Many approaches have been brought forward and out of these; Project-based Learning is on top. PBL has been introduced in combination with various other frameworks to teach programming i.e., agile, scrum and task-driven teaching. Although, none of these approaches provides the teaching content for developing the project iteratively. In this research, we have merged Project-based Learning with an iterative approach to build-up a teaching model that will help students learn the skills and implement them accordingly with the help of a project. Students learn one skill at a time and implement that in the project. We also present our experience with the course taught according to this approach to undergraduate computer science students of session 2020 at the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. Results show that the iterative teaching model proposed in this paper addresses various shortfalls of the previously presented techniques and fulfils the requirements of an introductory programming course. Furthermore, the results also show an increase in the motivation of the students towards learning programming.