A Study of Code Design Skills in Novice Programmers using the SOLO taxonomy

There is a wealth of literature dealing with the difficulties of novice programmers with basic programming constructs such as variables, assignment and conditionals. In this paper we extend the study to two other core CS1 topics: loops and vectors (represented as single dimensional arrays). By the end of their first semester of instruction, students are expected to have acquired both the ability to reproduce given syntactic structure and basic design skills that allow them to write small pieces of code that extend, modify or combine in new ways the basic programming constructs.