The paths taken by good and weak programming students
Abstract: Introductory programming is a course where students have lots of learning difficulties and teachers need to be very attentive to their teaching methodologies to try to overcome those difficulties. This situation motivates the study of the patterns that might exist in the paths of the best students and in the paths of the worst students. The identification of patterns in the paths of the best students, allow the dissemination of good learning behaviours that could help the other students to get better results, while the identification of patterns in the paths of the worst students help teachers to better think and implement strategies that could change their learning behaviours, through different teaching strategies and improve their performance from the beginning. In this paper we describe a study done in two introductory programming courses and the analysis of students answers show different patterns in best and worst students.