Title
Can Novice Programmers Write C Functions?
Abstract
This work has analysed the solutions submitted by 301 students to a practical exam question from a CS1 course that covered C functions. We have focused on the ability of students to declare the function header correctly and to return a value to the main program. The analysis of exam's solutions showed that most students could write a function definition with the given name and number of parameters. Most mistakes were usually related to type, either in the function return value or in the input parameter. Besides, some students were inconsistent in that they declared a correct "int" function but instead of returning a value, they printed either the result or a message describing the output. It is worth noticing 16% of students developed a solution inside the main program instead of attempting to write a separate function, which indicates they have trouble understanding and writing modular code.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/TALE.2018.8615375
PROCEEDINGS OF 2018 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON TEACHING, ASSESSMENT, AND LEARNING FOR ENGINEERING (TALE)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
novice programmer, functions, function structure, modularity
Conference
2374-0191
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Cruz Izu114923.41
Peter Dinh200.34