The prior experience of entering CS students

Abstract

One of the foremost issues for instructors of "Introduction to Programming" or "CS1" courses is the diversity of students' backgrounds { on one end of the range, a signicant portion of students start their computing degree without prior programming expertise, while on the other end, many students have even worked in a job where programming was a substantial part. This diversity makes it dicult to adapt programming instruction to students' prior experience. The present article describes students' programming and computing experience when entering the ETH Computer Science bachelor program. It is based on the data of over 900 ETH students participating in the study in the past seven years and 77 students from University of York answering the questionnaire in 2008. The article reports on the analysis of changes over the years, presents a comparison between the data of ETH and York, and describes the pedagogical implications for courses and textbooks.