When learning to program, students may face a number of obstacles that need to be overcome if they are to become system developers, or at least pass the introductory programming course. For most students, programming requires a different mindset than other subjects they have studied earlier. A useful model of code comprehension is the block model, describing three key aspects that the students need to understand: the text surface, the functional and the machine side of a program.
As described by Cutts and Kallia (2023), explicitly addressing these aspects in lectures may help students. However, they also note that some students do not seem to understand these different aspects, and that not only do some students have an incorrect understand of what happens when a program is executed, some students seem to have no understanding of the machine side at all, considering only the text surface and functional aspects.
The main topic of this thesis is to investigate novice programming students' understanding of the machine side, and in particular whether some students actually have no such understanding at all. This may include creating tasks that may reveal and distinguish between wrong and missing understanding, observing/interviewing students struggling with programming, and possibly creating and testing an intervention to help students gain the necessary understanding of the machine side so that they can get a better grasp at what programming really is about, and from there improve their own programming skills.
As the introductory programming courses at UiO are taught in Norwegian, the master student must be able to understand Norwegian. Due to possible collaboration with international researchers, the thesis should be written in English and the student must be comfortable with parts of the supervision and other meetings taking place at Zoom.