Towards Assessment of Practicality of Introductory Programming Course Using Vocabulary of Textbooks, Assignments, and Actual Projects

Abstract

In an assignment-based introductory programming course, a teacher makes a daily class plan based on a textbook and assigns tasks to the students. Assignments are prepared by the teacher so that students can have a better understanding of programming language constructs explained in the course. On the other hand, it is unclear how those language constructs are useful for practical programming tasks. To analyze the practicality of a programming course, this study proposes to compare the vocabularies of code used in textbooks, assignments, and regular programming tasks. If the vocabularies of the textbooks and assignments are closer to that of source code in actual projects, the programming course is considered more practical. As a case study, we have applied the method to evaluate a programming course focusing on data science for graduate students. The result revealed inconsistency between the programming language constructs taught in the course and frequently used in data analysis programs on the Kaggle platform.