2.1 The ’what ’- changing curricular topics............... 7

The learning of software development is difficult for many students. Given a problem statement, students have to be able to: design a solution to the problem; implement a solution in a programming language; and test the solution. Often students miss out the design step and start writing programming code immediately. And yet instructors aim to encourage their students to develop a design in, for example, pseudocode. This helps students think carefully about their program designs without getting bogged down in the intricacies of a programming language. However students do not like writing pseudocode. Reasons for this include: it is another language to learn; they do not think that they are actually programming; they cannot test their designs as the designs are not executable; there is not a rigid syntax and so students are unsure whether their pseudocode meets an instructor's expectations. This paper concerns the development of a simple tool that helps students create pseudocode. The tool has been used and evaluated in an introductory programming unit of study. The results suggest that the tool was easy for students to use and that it helped support their learning.

Writing documentation is a perpetual exercise for the creators of software artifacts. For end-users, documentation is a key resource to learn how to use the artifact, but for the developer, documentation enables much more – not only the ability to understand someone else’s code, but to document one’s own thought processes regarding the architecture of the artifact and the code itself. Unfortunately, programmers usually do not create enough documentation, nor high enough quality documentation to replace an in-person discussion of the code. We believe this to be caused not by the inherent “laziness ” of programmers to document their code, but by physical interference in the commenting activity, since both programming and commenting utilize the same input channel: the keyboard. We have created Commenting by Voice, a tool that enables programmers to create code comments using audio recording and speech recognition and have these audio comments inserted in their code with the same status as textual comments. We hope that by parallelizing the input channels, programmers will comment their code more, and in doing so, enable others to better understand the original thought processes involved in the coding task. Programmers are quite expressive writing code; if given a chance, we hope that they become as expressive talking about it. 1

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