College Students’ Interest in Programming

What is it about?

In today’s world, tertiary institutions provide Computer Science and Information Technology courses to students for them to have the opportunity to improve the thinking computational skills they will need to function in today's computation-dependent society. Moreover, pupils who think they can finish programming tasks successfully are likely more to become interested. Additionally, effective approaches to impart computer programming frequently rise pupils' interest in programming. As a result, the study sought to examine college students’ interest in programming. The research design for the study was a survey method. The study’s population comprise of Computer Science and Information Technology students at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. The sample size was 368 where we used a systematic sampling technique to select participants for the study. The study shows that majority of college students have interest in programming. The results revealed that the total number of males who have interest in programming are greater than females and that the total number of males who study programming far outweigh the total number of females. It is recommended that females should be encouraged to study programming at the various institutions that provide programming courses to students.

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Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

Why is it important?

In Ghanaian universities, students find it difficult to learn computer programming. This has resulted in a loss of interest in learning computer programming. Empirically, several studies have been done on students’ interest in programming in developing and developed countries (Ntourou et al., 2021; Papadakis, Kalogiannakis, & Zaranis, 2016; Papadakis, 2016; Kanaki & Kalogiannakis, 2018) but very limited in Africa. Currently, there are limited studies on the effect of age on college students’ interest in programming. To bridge the gap in literature, the study sought to investigate college students’ interest in programming with age and gender as a factor.

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