Teaching Programming Skills in Large Digital Settings: Challenges and Experiences

Learning to program is inherently challenging for most people, particularly in digital settings or self-studies. Since 2018, the University of Konstanz offers an in-service post-qualification program for teachers in a blended learning format. Annually, the Kontaktstudium IMP post-qualifies a group of 150– 200 experienced school teachers of various subjects in computer science and programming. In the last six years, we have continuously asked ourselves how learning environments should be didactically designed to teach programming skills in a blended learning format for a heterogeneous audience. In this paper, we trace the conceptual development of our programming courses, starting from a typical face-to-face lecture to a sophisticated flipped classroom with various options in the preparation phase and during the face-to-face meetings for different learner types. We will describe the challenges we faced, how we addressed them, and the current design of our programming course, including a qualitative and quantitative analysis of feedback from the different phases of the course design.