Rethinking Programming Education: A Lecture-Free Approach

Just-in-time hands-on experience is essential for learning programming. It not only helps reinforce learned concepts immediately, but also encourages the exploration of new concepts and language constructs. Integrating hands-on activities into traditional programming classrooms, however, presents a fundamental challenge. Coordinating instructor explanations with student coding activities and providing timely feedback to all students before moving forward is impractical for large or medium-sized classes. This paper demonstrates how cognitive and constructive learning principles can help transform a classroom into an active learning environment that blends conceptual learning and hands-on experience for an object-oriented programming course. Instead of attending traditional lectures, our students use the class time to participate in Moodle-based activities that feature diverse question types and immediate feedback. They work at their own pace, individually or in small teams, while the instructor guides them and provides support as needed. In a section of 41 students, 88% preferred this approach over lectures. These students scored 14.2% higher on the same exam compared to 111 peers enrolled in other sections that used traditional teaching in the same semester.