An Analysis of Using Coral Many Small Programs in CS1

Abstract

Coral is an ultra-simple programming language designed to look like
pseudocode while resembling industry programming languages like C++,
Java, and Python. Coral was created specifically for learners and thus,
in 2019, our CS1 began teaching programming fundamentals with Coral
during the first 3 weeks before switching to C++ for the remainder of
the term. Our university already adapted a many small programs (MSP)

teaching approach which involves assigning students multiple smaller as-
signments instead of only giving them one large assignment each week.

In this work, we share our experience using a hybrid Coral/C++ MSP
approach versus a pure C++ MSP approach. We summarize similarities
and differences between student performance and other metrics such as
time spent, start date, and more. We found that instructors can use a

hybrid Coral/C++ approach to have an easier class startup while main-
taining high student grade performance.