The Gobstones method for teaching computer programming

Within the context of Argentina universities that have computer science degrees in their curricula, one of the major challenges is to teach an introductory programming course for the first semester. The problem appears because the students come with serious deficiencies from their previous education level (secondary schools). Among these deficiencies, we identify their lack of abstraction capabilities and mathematical skills, which are usually considered as prerrequisites to take a programming course. This article introduces the GOBSTONES method for teaching an introductory programming course. The method was developed at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes in Argentina, taking into account the described background of the students, and has shown a positive impact by improving the passing rate of those students. GOBSTONES method's main goal was to foster abstraction and abstract thinking to students that have not developed good abstraction skills. A programming language, also called GOBSTONES, was developed to implement the ideas presented herein. The method focuses on the representation of information, both at the level of code in the form of procedures to express abstraction, and at the level of the universe of discourse, which is a concrete one, but allowing the representation of information in a simple way. Moreover, the tools implementing GOBSTONES have a feature that enables the student to see a visualization of the represented elements.