A system to help teaching and learning algorithms

One of the big challenges that teachers and students face at early stages of CSET (Computer Science, Engineering, and Technology) courses are the difficulties related to teaching and learning algorithms. Usually, such knowledge is presented during introductory programming related disciplines, when students are also presented to some programming language to describe simple algorithms. Therefore, they need to learn not only the new language but also a formal way to describe the solution of problems using that language. This is much different from any formalism they were presented in their previous student´s experience. This paper presents iVProg, a system conceived to overcome some of these difficulties by using visual programming. Some experiments were conducted during three years to evaluate students´ performance without the system support and with it using different didactic approaches.