Today I read a paper on teaching programming that surprised me greatly. Since I teach a University class on object oriented programming using Java and Eclipse, this article jumped out it me. It may mean some of my students that complain bitterly that my course is very challenging and expectations are way too high might actually be right. I'm not ready to hit the panic button and redesign my course just yet - but this has got me thinking a lot about this and doing more research to assess what the body of knowledge can tell me.

According to this How we Teach Introductory Computer Science is Wrong, "

Not problem-solving leads to better problem-solving skills than those doing problem-solving". The research paper and literature review behind this blog indicate that there is no experimental evidence that teaching beginner programmers to program by diving in and programming is correct. On the contrary, there is evidence that by giving the problem and solution to students (i.e. complete code) and walking them through it the first few times may actually be more effective. The experiments cited indicate students who used this approach may solve problems up to 5 times faster and with fewer errors.

I am very surprised by this and still digesting this information. What do you think? Is this a superior way to teach programming?