Talking at Cross Purposes - Perceived Learning Barriers by Students and Teachers in Programming Education

The knowledge on freshmen's problems and learning barriers in programming can help the instructors to adapt their teaching and to provide necessary assistance. This paper presents the results of two surveys conducted on secondary school teachers and computer science first-year students even before their first lecture. In total, we interviewed 61 teachers and 61 students with an open-ended questionnaire resulting in a qualitative study of the answers. The goal of the investigation is to find out the perceptions of learning barriers related to programming education. Our results indicate differences as well as commonalities in both perspectives given by teachers and students.