Effects of a preliminary programming course on students' performance

This paper presents the results of the evaluation of a preliminary course teaching concepts of programming to first semester students. The course is meant to facilitate the students' entry into the first semester lecture "Concepts of Programming" which corresponds to a CS1 course. For this lecture Java is used as programming language, however its object centered approach is considered too complex for beginners and not suited to teach procedural programming. Therefore we use Python in the preliminary course which can be utilized as a procedural language. Several surveys were conducted during and after the course. Additionally we compared the performance of course participants against non-participants in the written exam of the lecture. Although no significant improvement was noted, we nevertheless have observed some improvements on the border of significance in students comprehension of Java code after learning Python. Further on in the exam results of the regular CS1 lecture we have observed a higher knowledge heterogeneity in the group of non-participants compared to course participants.