Study of a Pedagogy Adopted to Generate Interest in Students Taking a Programming Course

With mobile application development becoming one of the most sought-after choices by computer science students, developers and companies, an instructor teaching a course on the same to a batch of beginners should ensure that the best possible teaching-learning methodologies are adopted to generate interest among students in the classroom. The author used a blended approach consisting of traditional, e-learning and m-learning strategies. These in turn, consisted of various teaching and evaluation methods. Through this paper, the author discusses the impact of the methods adopted as part of the experiment, on the interest of the students and their respective performance. The sample consisted of 22 postgraduate computer science students. Their responses to the instruments administered, their scores and their LMS access logs were analyzed. The author was able to achieve statistically significant results with respect to the students' interest and their performance, for mainly two strategies - integration of LMS, and teaching the topics by developing an application in multiple phases throughout the duration of the course. It was found that with regards to project work, continuous interaction with the instructor was a desired and accepted approach by the students. The study also revealed the misconceptions that an instructor may have when teaching a programming language or when using mobile devices for teaching. The results of this study may be used by instructors teaching any programming language in higher education.