Problem-solving

The blog Confessions of a mediocre programmer  by Alan Norton is one of the most interesting blogs I read in 2010. Including a great definition of a Mediocre Programmer: " Mediocre programmer  - A programmer who has a limited toolset. He knows the syntax of only the simplest commands, but he knows where to find the syntax for more complex commands. He doesn’t know how to write the most efficient code, but he knows how to rewrite and test the code for greater efficiency if he must. He runs into more roadblocks along his passage to success, but he views each as a challenge and is confident that he will find a path around each roadblock. He may take longer to get there, but he always reaches his goal. He doesn’t know how to create a DLL, but he knows he can if necessary. Like most programmers, he doesn’t particularly like documenting his work but does so anyway because he is a professional. " Alan Norton (2010) A definition which in their heart of hearts a lot of success...

One of the criticism of the robot programming part of the Junkbots project is not everyone necessarily gets a go at the programming. To address this a new feature has been added to the project. There are now two parallel activities   as well as programming a robot; there is a separate programming exercise carried out at the same time which replicates some of the same actions of the robot but this time on screen. Figure: Robot pushing a barrel These exercises are based around the increasngily popular  Greenfoot software ( http://www.greenfoot.org/download/ ) which is free to download and use. This can be put on as many machines as are need enabling more people to have a go at programming. The exercises initially gets participants to set-up the world, place a robot within it and get the robot to move across the screen. Building on the each previous exercise, the complexity increases and includes challenges (such as in the figure) where the robot p...

Jonathan Adams, Phil Picton and Stefan Kaczmarczyk from the School of Science and Technology, University of Northampton in collaboration with Peter Demian from Loughborough University have recently published a paper in the Journal   Enhancing the Learner Experience in Higher Education  entitled " Problem solving and creativity in Engineering: turning novices into professionals ". Abstract: Recent UK and European benchmarks for both undergraduate and professional engineers highlight the importance of problem solving skills. They additionally identify creativity as an important capacity alongside problem solving for both novices and professionals. But, how can we develop and encourage these important skills in undergraduate engineers? For many years researchers have explored how the differences between novices and experts might show educators techniques for improving the problem solving abilities of their students. Whilst it is often a...

Problem solving is not trivial (Beaumont and Fox, 2003).  In fact, if we think about Bloom’s Taxonomy’s (Bloom 1956) and the Cognitive Domain, problem-solving involves the high-level skills of synthesis, evaluation, analysis and applications, so perhaps it is not surprising that student’s often struggle in this area and with subjects based around problem-solving (such as programming). A much discussed and related area of Computational Thinking ( Wing, 2006) has raised the profile of areas such as problem-solving, by highlighting the importance of “ thinking like a computer scientist ” (Wing 2006). The thought processes involved in being a computer scientist are more complicated than just being able to program, “ Computational thinking is reformulating a seemingly difficult problem into one we know how to solve, perhaps by reduction, embedding, transformation, or simulation. ” (Wing, 2006). The skills of computer scientists are applicable to a much wider range of areas or as W...

A recent paper by Oddie et al (2010) from the Liverpool Hope University, UK look at the  use of robotics can facilitate the students’ understanding and application of problem solving and programming. It provides an interesting discussion on the use of robots for teaching programming and some of the issues around teaching problem-solving skills. They looked at using the Flowcode Buggies and software from Matrix Multimedia    which are relatively inexpensive buggies and their graphical nature allows the students to focus more on the problem-solving side, before worrying about the grammar and syntax of a programming language (in their case C). Oddie O, Hazelwood P , Blakeway S, Whitfield A (2010) " INTRODUCTORY PROBLEM SOLVING AND PROGRAMMING: ROBOTICS VERSUS TRADITIONAL APPROACHES " ITALICS  Volume 9 Issue 2 Other sources that might be of interest: Alice, (2010), Alice Project, http://www.alice.org. Beaumont C, and Fox C, (2003), Learning Programming:...