John Homer Promotion Portfolio

Many beginning students fall quickly into habits of programming by trial-and-error: quickly writing out a solution, then iterating through error messages until it compiles, then iterating through a series of executions with sample data until a seemingly correct state is achieved. In our CS1 class, attempting to teach students to think through a problem before coding, we introduced “test-first” problems. For some problems, students are first asked to create and submit for grading a set of test cases that would thoroughly test the correctness of a proposed implementation. The test cases should be created and scored before a student ever begins writing the program. We theorized that students who considered and recognized both normal and edge cases for problem input would encounter less difficulty in programming the solutions.