Novel Teaching Strategies for Lab-Centric Courses:Case Study of Programming Course

It is observed that learning a programming course has been challenging and difficult for the learners. For a programming course, the learners need to learn the syntax and semantics of the programming language, but more importantly the learners need to develop problem-solving skills along with critical thinking. In this paper, a case study of teaching object-oriented programming course as lab-centric course is discussed. Novel teaching strategies, namely Predict-Observe-Explain-Improvise (POE-I) and BuddyHandholding-Explore-SelfEvaluation-Discussion-Improvement-Test (BESDIT) are designed for the lab-centric courses and its benefits are studied. Case study of the application of these novel strategies for the lab-centric programming course is presented and its impact is discussed.