The Live Programming Lecturing Technique: A Study of the Student Experience in Introductory and Advanced Programming Courses

Abstract

This paper investigates the topic of teaching programming in higher education. The teaching method often referred to as live programming has become a widely applied lecturing strategy for teaching programming subjects in an interactive fashion. Lectures based on live programming normally involve live demonstrations, explanations and interaction with the students. Although this technique seems to be very popular amongst students and instructors, we hypothesise that it also involves potential challenges. In this paper, we investigate the perceived difficulty and promise of following such an approach from a student perspective. We present results from interviews with 1st and 2nd year IT Bachelor students about their experience with live programming. Our results indicate that students’ engagement and desire to learn through active learning techniques still are very much valid also in introductory and advanced programming courses. Furthermore, we also interpret from our findings a suggested model of a repeated cycle of lecture, demo and exercise as highly beneficial to the student learning process.