31-08-2017, 01:00 PM
There is a growing interest in the Computer Science Education community to include test concepts in introductory programming courses. The main objective of POPT is to improve the traditional teaching method of introductory programming that focuses mainly on implementation and neglects testing. According to POPT, students' skills should be developed by addressing ill-defined problems, from which students are encouraged to develop test cases in a table-like fashion to illuminate problem requirements and also to improve code quality generated . This article presents the POPT study and a case study carried out in a course of Introductory Programming of a computer program of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. The results of the study have shown that, compared to a blind test approach, POPT encourages the implementation of better external quality programs - the first version of the program submitted by POPT students passed in twice the number of test cases to the non-POPT students. In addition, POPT students presented fewer versions of the programs and spent more time presenting the first version to the automatic evaluation system, which leads us to think that POPT students are encouraged to think better about the solution they are implementing.