An analysis of pattern usage in CS1 courses
type: CreativeWork
description: "When designing and planning the implementation of software, expert programmers rarely think at the syntactic level. Instead, they think at higher levels of abstraction, mentally ""chunking"" groups of lines of code into a single abstraction. These chunks have been referred to as patterns in CS1 literature and pattern-oriented instruction has been proposed. This thesis builds on the existing literature by analyzing instructor solutions to the assessments of a diverse collection of seven CS1 courses to identify the patterns that students are expected to learn. In particular, I make two contributions. First, I provide a catalog of the patterns that I identified. Second, I present analysis based on detailed records of which patterns occurred in which assessments. Results include the relative frequency of each pattern in all the assessments and the order in which patterns appeared in each course. I hope that this analysis enables instructors to be more conscientious and explicit in how these patterns are introduced to their students."
abstract: "When designing and planning the implementation of software, expert programmers rarely think at the syntactic level. Instead, they think at higher levels of abstraction, mentally ""chunking"" groups of lines of code into a single abstraction. These chunks have been referred to as patterns in CS1 literature and pattern-oriented instruction has been proposed. This thesis builds on the existing literature by analyzing instructor solutions to the assessments of a diverse collection of seven CS1 courses to identify the patterns that students are expected to learn. In particular, I make two contributions. First, I provide a catalog of the patterns that I identified. Second, I present analysis based on detailed records of which patterns occurred in which assessments. Results include the relative frequency of each pattern in all the assessments and the order in which patterns appeared in each course. I hope that this analysis enables instructors to be more conscientious and explicit in how these patterns are introduced to their students."
author: Iyer, Vighnesh Narayanan
language: en
keywords: CSEducation, Pattern Oriented Instruction, CS1
date published: 2020-10-07T21:00:09Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:48Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108537