Informatics in Education

The paper introduces Verificator, our learning programming interface aimed for learning programming in C++ at the university beginners' level. In teaching programming some specific problems concerning the teaching itself as well as the organization of the teaching process need to be considered. One of the biggest problems is that students tend to adopt certain bad programming habits in their attempt to more easily deal with their examinations, such as trying to write programs without any syntax and logical checking. It is very hard to help them correct those errors once they are deeply rooted. Our students' web questionnaire and its results show that the majority of problems in learning programming among our students arise from the gap between the understanding of programming language syntax and problem-solving algorithms. Verificator prevents students from making a lot of errors they are likely to make in learning programming and helps them to learn programming language syntax and adopt good programming habits.