Fostering Strategic Knowledge and Program Comprehension Skills in Students Struggling with CS1

In order to support students struggling with learning to program, we designed new learning material, around two basic principles from recent research on introductory programming education: Propose program comprehension tasks[4] beside writing tasks, and teaching strategic programming knowledge explicitly[5]. Such material may be of interest for high school teachers and academics teaching programming to novices. It was prepared and used in the context of a peer tutoring initiative targeted at undergraduate students of our CS degree program. We look for feedback and possible collaborators from other institutions, in order to carry out a methodologically sound investigation to measure the quality and effectiveness of the instructional material.