Teaching Introductory Programming

From the educational point of view, learning by mistake could be influential teaching method, especially for teaching/learning Computer Science (CS), and/or Information Technologies (IT). As learning programming is very difficult and hard task, perhaps even more difficult and extremely demanding job to teach novices how to make correct computers programs. The concept of design pedagogical patterns has received surprisingly little attention so far from the researchers in the field of pedagogy/didactics of Computer Science. Design pedagogical patterns are descriptions of successful solutions of common problems that occur in teaching/learning CS and IT. Good pedagogical patterns could help teachers when they have to design new course, lessons, topics, examples, and assignments, in a particular context. Pedagogical patterns captured the best practice in a teaching/learning CS and/or IT. They could be very helpful to the teachers in preparing their own lessons. In this paper a brief description of special class design of pedagogical patterns, the group of patterns for learning by mistakes, is presented. In addition, usage of helpful and misleading pedagogical agents, which have been developed in Agent-based E-learning System (AE-lS), based on pedagogical pattern for explanation Explain, and pedagogical pattern for learning by mistakes Wolf, Wolf, Mistake, is described. Keywords—Pedagogical Pattern; Pattern Design; Learning; Programming; Computer science education; Programming; Software agents; Electronic learning; Computer aided instruction