Teaching during the Covid-19 Pandemic --- Online Programming Education

Abstract

Teaching programming skills is an essential part of the first-semester computer science curriculum. During the Covid-19, it became particularly challenging as, in particular, the essential exercise lessons had to be implemented virtually. Before the pandemic, we implemented didactic concepts like objects-first and gamification with the hamster simulator. They had to be transferred to the virtual setting as good as possible. In this paper, we report on the implementation of our virtual course programming and software development. In particular, we report on the lessons we learnt from our course implementation, which, overall, was relatively successful.