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Understanding Students’ Failure to use Functions as a Tool for Abstraction – An Analysis of Questionnaire Responses and Lab Assignments in a CS1 Python Course
Volume 20, Issue 4 (2021), pp. 583–614
Pontus HAGLUND   Filip STRÖMBÄCK   Linda MANNILA  

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https://doi.org/10.15388/infedu.2021.26
Pub. online: 5 August 2022      Type: Article      Open accessOpen Access

Published
5 August 2022

Abstract

Controlling complexity through the use of abstractions is a critical part of problem solving in programming. Thus, becoming proficient with procedural and data abstraction through the use of user-defined functions is important. Properly using functions for abstraction involves a number of other core concepts, such as parameter passing, scope and references, which are known to be difficult. Therefore, this paper aims to study students’ proficiency with these core concepts, and students’ ability to apply procedural and data abstraction to solve problems. We collected data from two years of an introductory Python course, both from a questionnaire and from two lab assignments. The data shows that students had difficulties with the core concepts, and a number of issues solving problems with abstraction. We also investigate the impact of using a visualization tool when teaching the core concepts.

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Open access article under the CC BY license.

Keywords
abstraction core concepts procedural abstraction data abstraction CS1 Python functions prerequisites parameter passing scope references Python Tutor

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