Analysis of Research into the Teaching and Learning of Programming: An Updated Review

Around a decade ago, Salleh, Shukur, and Judi conducted a systematic review to analyse research on programming teaching tools. They identified a range of interesting findings from 45 scholarly articles that were published between 2005 and 2011. In our work, we reproduce this systematic study exactly, with the only deliberate change being that we consider works published from 2011 to 2022. Following the original methodology, a set of 26 research papers was selected. In the current work, the same research questions as the earlier study were considered, investigating (1) the issues discussed, (2) the methods used, (3) the types of tools involved, and (4) the level of programming expertise addressed. While one systematic review offers an overview of a field at a certain moment in time, two reviews carried out along the same lines but at distinct points in time allow for the identification of evolving patterns. Concretely, it was found that the more recent literature has a stronger emphasis on formal models and theories, greater reliance on surveys and empirical evaluations, and an increased interest in online tools.