Focus Group Report

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Introduction

Through research and our own experiences with programming we have come to find out that students rely heavily on the internet when trying to solve an error in their programming assignments or when they are trying to firmly grasp a concept.We would like to examine students search habits and determine if there is a pattern that exists when searching for explanations and solutions online that yields optimal understanding of the material.

We gathered a group of 5 students who were all undergraduates studying computer science or computer engineering; both majors take the same 4 coding classes to begin with. We also made sure that the classes taken by the group collectively ranged from lower level freshman courses to intermediate level junior courses. We did this so that our data would reflect the thoughts of new and experienced students. We compensated each participant as an incentive. We met with this group of students twice within the semester. We gave the students a month and a half before we met again so that their professors would have ample time to assign them projects to complete. We had the focus group participants submit all web searches which related to bugs in their programming assignments. These students submitted a total of 30 bugs.

Results

We first started by asking our students why they chose computer science/engineering as a major. All of the participants noted that they have always had a knack of some sort for computers and technology. One in particular stated that they thought it would be a good career choice for them.

Through the questioning during our first meeting we were able to learn that most of the time when students are given a programming assignment they jump into coding without much research or use of textbook resources. Though we did not sway students actions either way our data shows that after our first meeting with the students all but one said that they did some type of research on their project before coding the remainder of their projects for the semester. This suggests that the logging of bugs helped students plan and prepare for assignments more efficiently.

The participants pointed out that topics that they found most challenging were pointers, multidimensional arrays, recursion, and memory management.