Jacqueline L. Whalley, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
jacqueline.whalley@aut.ac.nz

Whalley, J. (2007, Jun), Section Editor's Note: BRACElet. Bulletin of Applied Computing and Information Technology Vol. 5, Issue 1. ISSN 1176-4120. Retrieved from

A common educator’s lament is that their students have a fragile grasp of programming and a lack of problem solving skills. This is not a new phenomenon but has been a recurring theme in the computer-science education literature: too many students don’t know how to read programs, they don’t know how to design programs, they don’t know how to problem-solve and they don’t know how to write programs.

Unfortunately we as educators don’t really understand the process or journey undertaken by novice programmers when learning to program. While there are plenty of anecdotally based beliefs there is little empirical evidence that allows us to build a model of a student programmer’s developmental stages and cognitive processes. Until we know more about how students learn programming our ability to design more effective teaching programmes will be limited.

The BRACElet project is a longitudinal multi-institutional multi-national that aims to provide insight into the little understood domain of reading and writing code as a novice programmer.

The project group seeks to investigate the code reading, code comprehension and code writing skills of novice programmers and:

• Extend the knowledge of the stages involved in learning programming skills.
• Investigate the reasoning process students use and categorise this process using Blooms revised taxonomy and the SOLO taxonomy.
• Develop a common understanding of the application of Bloom’s taxonomy and SOLO in the computer programming domain.
• Develop a common framework for computer science education research projects that focus on computer programming.

The project has been underway for two years and the current project team consists of 27 academics from 16 institutions, five countries and three continents.

The expected outcome is that the insights provided in this work will contribute to better curriculum design, teaching and assessment practices in the teaching and learning of programming.

This section presents two papers that emerged as a result of the Fourth BRACElet Workshop held in conjunction with the 19th Annual Conference of the National Advisory Committee on Computing Qualifications on the 7 July 2006.

The first article entitled “The Many Ways of BRACElet” addresses the key practices and processes that ensure the success of a longitudinal multi-institutional multi-national research project. It reflects on the first two years of the project and makes some recommendations for others considering embarking on such a study.

The second article focuses on the workshop itself by putting this workshop into context and then discussing the activities and findings since the last workshop as well as during this workshop. The paper concludes by identifying future avenues for investigation.

Copyright © 2007 Jacqueline L. Whalley
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 Copyright © 2007 NACCQ, Krassie Petrova, Michael Verhaart, Alison Young and Tony Clear (Eds.) . An Open Access Journal, DOAJ # 11764120