2018 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)
The novice programmer needs a plan
Kathryn Cunningham
School of Information, University of Michigan
kicunn@umich.edu
I. I NTRODUCTION
Algorithms and automation run social worlds, support sci-
entific discovery, and even arbitrate economic opportunity.
Job opportunities in computer science match this outsized
influence: projected job growth in computing dwarfs that of
other STEM fields [1]. In recognition of this reality, the
movement to expand computing education to all students,
including low-income, underrepresented minority, and female
students, has grown by leaps and bounds. This has led to
computing instruction in K-12, more computing in colleges,
and a more diverse set of students to teach.
However, current approaches to teaching programming of-
ten fall short. Multi-institutional, multi-national studies have
shown that many students complete a college-level intro-
ductory computing course without being able to write basic
programs [2], or in some cases, read small pieces of code and
predict their result [3]. Extending current teaching techniques
into earlier grades or to groups with weaker academic prepa-
ration isn’t a promising approach.
Something isn’t working in introductory computing
classrooms—and the dominant strategy for programming in-
struction should be re-examined. A typical programming
course today focuses on syntax elements as units of program-
ming knowledge, with textbook chapters often arranged to
cover one or two elements (e.g. if/else statements) at a time.
Similarly, validated assessments of introductory programming
knowledge, like the FCS1 [4], have conceptual topics that
read like the Backus-Naur form of a programming language
grammar: “Logical Operators”, “Assignment”, “Definite Loop
(for)”, etc.
While a detailed focus on the behavior of syntax elements
has been shown to improve student outcomes (e.g. [5]),
focusing on this behavior alone has drawbacks. There are
endless ways to combine syntax elements, and a correspond-
ingly large mental search space for the novice programmer to
think through when writing code or understanding someone
else’s code. Familiarity with how coding syntax works doesn’t
directly explain how to build a program that achieves a certain
goal or immediately illuminate why someone wrote code the
way they did. An instructional technique that streamlines this
process may lead more students to success.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGC-1148903
978-1-5386-4235-1/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
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II. A PLAN - BASED APPROACH HOLDS PROMISE
In contrast to a syntax focus, some computing education
researchers have explored an explicit focus on common pat-
terns or strategies used when coding. While rare in classrooms,
this approach potentially aligns with a basic psychological
fact: humans often use schemas (mental patterns or frames)
to organize their knowledge. If we can teach schemas that
correspond to common patterns used by programmers, we
potentially provide students with a powerful problem-solving
tool.
In the 1980s, Elliot Soloway developed a framework of
goals and plans to explain how programs are written. A
programmer has goals they want to achieve and corresponding
plans of code that achieve the goals. These plans are “canned”
solutions to common programming problems, such as checking
if an input is valid, summing up all values in a list, or stopping
a search when a sentinel value is read. Soloway criticized
the syntactic approach as avoiding the parts of programming
where students really struggle: composing pieces of a program
together into a functional whole [6].
III. S TUDENTS PROBLEM - SOLVE THROUGH PATTERNS
We know that experts use plans to problem-solve while
writing code [7], but is this approach also appropriate for
novices? My recent work suggests that use of programming
plans is natural even for students in their first programming
course.
I interviewed 13 students about the ways they sketched and
drew on scratch paper while solving problems on a recent
introductory programming exam. I found that tracing through
the behavior of a piece of code was often performed in service
of a search for some sort of structure or pattern with which
to organize their thoughts. For example, one student described
her success in determining the goal of a code snippet she was
asked to analyze on the exam:
“I was just writing out just to see which numbers I was
going to deal with. Then afterwards I would just look at it
and I would be like, oh, so it’s going to look for the one that’s
the greatest...”
A careful trace on scratch paper was also used to confirm
the plan or pattern a student had tentatively identified:
“I saw the pattern, and I just wanted to write it up to make
sure the pattern was right.”
Rather than simply mimicking each step of code execution,
these students are taking the very human action of searching
for meaning in which to ground their problem-solving. In
code reading problems, we know that tracing the behavior of
 2018 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

code execution on paper is correlated with greater problem-

solving success [3]. However, in practice, students searched
for what the code was “supposed” to do, and turned to careful
tracing only when the goal of the code was unclear or needed
confirmation. It seems that the ability to accurately recognize
plans may mediate the success of novice programmers.
IV. W ORKING WITH STUDENT TENDENCIES , NOT AGAINST
Students’ search for plans and patterns is a potentially
useful tendency that could be strengthened as a problem-
solving approach. There is an opportunity for instructors to
facilitate use of this strategy for all students, but little work
has been done about how to explicitly incorporate plans into
an instructional approach.
Instead, much recent work in building student programming
skill has focused on improving understanding of program
behavior. Many iterations of program visualization tools have
been created to demonstrate the changes in memory as code
executes [9]. These tools execute every step of code execution,
giving a look “inside” the computer. However, they do not have
the capability to infer the goal of the code they visualize, or
even any patterns or structure in the changes of key variables.
V. F UTURE DIRECTIONS
The focus on plans as an alternative instructional approach
Fig. 1. Examples of a plan in two different contexts.
is promising, but much work is needed in order to prove its
effectiveness and make it actionable in the classroom. While
past work has described how students may build programs R EFERENCES
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