(How) Should Variables and Their Naming Be Taught in Novice Programming Education?

With the growing interest in programming skills in society, programming will inevitably become part of national curricula. The research presented on this poster aims to address programming for everyone and hopes to contribute to the accessibility of programming lessons for both students and teachers with various backgrounds. In order to do so, we approach the learning and teaching of a programming language from a natural language perspective, and in particular, we focus on reading code, including one of the most important programming concepts: variables.

During the last decades, the number of research projects on reading code has increased. For example, research on reading and explaining code has shown that code reading skills correlate to code writing skills [4, 5, 11, 12, 15]. Neuroscientific results indicate that language-related brain networks are possibly more important when programming than brain networks related to problem-solving or mathematics [7, 8, 13]. In addition, classroom experiments demonstrate how training on technical reading abilities can improve programming skills [6], and how reading code aloud, a strategy derived from natural language learning, helps with remembering syntax, which is an element of coding that beginners often struggle with [9, 14].

Research has also shown the importance of variables in reading and understanding code. It is commonly accepted that meaningful identifier names (or ‘mnemonic’ names) help readers understand code more easily than when abbreviations or (random) letters are used [2, 10], although it has also been found that such names can be misleading if they wrongly represent their contents or purpose [1, 3]. The question still remains what is “good” variable naming for learning to program.

Existing research on variable naming usually focuses on understanding code or assessing the readability of code. To the best of our knowledge, no prior research has looked at how (if) variable names are considered in the classroom and if there are any strategies used for practicing naming. This poster presents some initial findings of 12 semi-structured interviews (60 minutes) with teachers from secondary education, university-level education, and adult education on the practice of teaching variables. Our focus is on naming, but we also cover more general teaching strategies and practice, common student difficulties (related to variables) as experienced by the teachers, as well as teachers’ perceptions of the importance of variable naming.

Our preliminary results show two main approaches to teaching variable naming: a small group clearly highlights the importance of good and consistent naming throughout their courses, although there is no consensus on ”good naming practices”. Another group of teachers finds naming important, but does not (yet) translate this in their teaching. This group may even completely ignore naming or give inconsistent naming examples. Overall, naming is not included in grading. Teachers reflect that good naming practices may help students understand programming concepts quicker and mention that better students also show better naming practices in their own code. With our research, we hope to encourage discussion on the teaching of variables and work towards practical clues for (beginning) teachers to support them with accessible programming lessons.