Understanding students' problem-solving performance in the context of programming-in-the-small: an ethnographic field study

An ethnographic approach was applied to identify problem solving skills used in software design. The individual and groups of students were observed resolving software design problems. This was in the context of programming-in-the-small. A heuristic analysis was generated from these observations and the students' laboratory books. The analysis identified only 35% of the students formally created designs using abstraction and decomposition methods. 85% of the students completed their software design problems with no recourse to any conceptual design. These latter students could not formally verify their software. A further problem was recognized where 65% of the students were unable to differentiate between syntactic and semantic errors. The paper concludes with the importance of these findings fir the design of programming and software engineering curricula.