Collaborative learning - towards a solution for novice programmers

Students continue to struggle with learning to program, for reasons that we hypothesise are not solely cognitive. This paper reports on the results of a survey indicating that as students progress through a first programming unit, they enjoy it less, find it more difficult than they expected, and have less confidence in being able to successfully complete it. The students also believed that collaborative learning would have a beneficial impact on their learning outcomes and make studying programming more engaging, interactive, and fun. As a precursor to trialling collaborative problem solving and programming in introductory programming units at QUT, collaborative learning and its potential positive effect on the learning outcomes of programming students is investigated