Student Differences in Regards to Programming Experience Beginning Upper Secondary School in Sweden

Sammanfattning

Recent changes in Swedish curriculum now involve programming to be taught in elementary school. There are different programming languages a novice programmer can learn and it can have different effects on the learning ability. Teachers in upper secondary school face a challenge to continue teaching programming without knowing the prerequisities of students.Previous research suggests block-based programming is preferable for novice programmers and the purpose of this thesis was to provide teachers with more information regarding students programming knowledge to be able to create better environments for teaching. Data used for this cosist of students attending NTI-Gymnasiet in Uppsala Sweden taking a test answering selfreported questions on previous experience and ten block-based as well as ten text-based programming problems to solve. The data was analyzed in R providing statistical difference in scores regarding previous experience of block- or text-based programming. Correlations of time spent programming within and outside of school on the other hand were stronger and statistically significant.