POPT: A Problem-Oriented Programming and Testing approach for novice students

There is a growing interest of the Computer Science education community for including testing concepts on introductory programming courses. Aiming at contributing to this issue, we introduce POPT, a Problem-Oriented Programming and Testing approach for Introductory Programming Courses. POPT main goal is to improve the traditional method of teaching introductory programming that concentrates mainly on implementation and neglects testing. According to POPT, students´ skills must be developed by dealing with ill-defined problems, from which students are stimulated to develop test cases in a table-like manner in order to enlighten the problems´ requirements and also to improve the quality of generated code. This paper presents POPT and a case study performed in an Introductory Programming course of a Computer Science program at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. The study results have shown that, when compared to a Blind Testing approach, POPT stimulates the implementation of programs of better external quality - the first program version submitted by POPT students passed in twice the number of test cases (professor-defined ones) when compared to non-POPT students. Moreover, POPT students submitted fewer program versions and spent more time to submit the first version to the automatic evaluation system, which lead us to think that POPT students are stimulated to think better about the solution they are implementing.