A community of practice approach to learning programming

In programming courses, teaching students who have varied levels of knowledge and skills the requisite competencies to perform in real-world software development teams is indeed difficult. To address this problem, this paper proposes a community of practice (CoP) approach and provides some guidelines to simulate a real-world CoP in a blended learning environment. It simulates not only the role structure and tasks but also the participation process. The design of this approach is based on the situated learning perspective that considers learning to be a trajectory in which learners move from legitimate peripheral participation to full participation in CoPs. The results from the data analysis and questionnaires indicated that the students were very engaged in this activity and believed that this approach helped them to develop necessary programming knowledge and skills. This study also reports certain constraints and suggestions for teachers who want to adapt this approach for their courses.