A study by a ITiCSE 2001 working group ("the McCracken Group") established that many students do not know how to program at the conclusion of their introductory courses. A popular explanation for this incapacity is that the students lack the ability to problem-solve. That is, they lack the ability to take a problem description, decompose it into sub-problems and implement them, then assemble the pieces into a complete solution. An alternative explanation is that many students have a fragile grasp of both basic programming principles and the ability to systematically carry out routine programming tasks, such as tracing (or “desk checking”) through code. This ITiCSE 2004 working group studied the alternative explanation, by testing

Boyer coined the term "scholarship of teaching", but the term has become ambiguous. In this paper, I nominate my own three categorizations of university computing educators: amateurs, students, and researchers. Amateurs may be excellent with students, but they do not routinely engage in dialog with other teachers about teaching. Students embrace the general theories of education, and write papers about how they have reconstructed their teaching in accordance with those theories. Researchers are engaged in the development and dissemination of a disciplinespecific pedagogy. Researchers do not reject the general education literature, but neither do they simply accept it. Instead, that literature offers theories that may or may not be verified in the laboratory of their own class room. They are involved in a discipline-based research community that transcends institutional boundaries. I illustrate these categories with examples from my own teaching, as an amateur, student, and researcher. 1.

In this paper we present qualitative findings on the influence of previous programming experience on the learning of the visual, scenario-based programming language of live sequence charts (LSC). Our findings suggest that previous programming experience leads programmers not only to misunderstand or misinterpret concepts that are new to them, but that it can also lead them to actively distort the new concepts in a way that enables them to use familiar programming patterns, rather than exploiting the new ones to good effect. Eventually, this leads to poor usage of some of the new concepts, and also to the creation of programs that behaved differently from what the programmers expected. We also show that previous programming experience can affect programmers ’ attitude towards new programming concepts. Attitude is known to have an effect on performance. Since LSC and its underlying concepts are of growing popularity in the software engineering community, it is interesting to investigate its learning process. Furthermore, we believe that our findings can shed light on some of the ways by which previous programming experience influences the learning of new programming concepts and paradigms.