A paper has recently been published in International Journal of Quality Assurance in Engineering and Technology Education on problem-solving and programming by two members of the Department of Computing and Immersive Technologies, University of Northampton. Problems First, Second and Third. Gary Hill and Scott Turner DOI: 10.4018/ijqaete.2014070104 Abstract This paper considers the need to focus initial programming education on problem-solving, prior to the teaching of programming syntax and software design methodology. The main vehicle for this approach is simple Lego based robots programmed in Java, followed by the programming of a graphical representation/simulation to develop programming skills. Problem solving is not trivial (Beaumont & Fox, 2003) and is an important skill, central to computing and engineering. The paper extends the authors earlier research on problems first and problem solving (Hill & Turner, 2011) to furthe...
Robots and getting computers to work with the physical world is fun; this blog looks at my own personal experimenting and building in this area.