A Qualitative Analysis of Lecture Videos and Student Feedback on Static Code Examples and Live Coding: A Case Study

One of the goals of computing education research is to understand and document the effectiveness of pedagogical strategies in computing. Among the many methods available to teach programming, two commonly used techniques to present code in Computer Science classes are static code examples (where pre-written code snippets are used during lectures) and live coding (where code is written before the students during the lecture). Even though prior research has tried comparing the effectiveness of these two teaching techniques on student learning and cognitive load, little is known about the structure of these code presentation techniques. In this study, we analyze the lecture recordings of a mid-level Computer Science course which uses both static code examples and live coding for teaching code snippets. We analyze these recordings with the intent to understand what these pedagogical techniques for teaching and learning programming consist of. We also analyze student feedback about both these pedagogical strategies to better understand these teaching methods from the students’ perspective. We believe that our work will shed light on the usefulness of static code examples and live coding in Computer Science courses.