Investigating Difficulties of Learning Computer Programming in Saudi Arabia

Learning computer programming is one of the main requirements of many educational study plans in higher education. Research has shown that many students face difficulties acquiring reasonable programming skills during their first year of college. In Saudi Arabia, there are twenty-three state-owned universities scattered around the country that provide free college education for Saudi students. Through a quick glance at the website of these universities, we found out that almost all of them offer the same course description and requirements for the computer-programming course. The poor performance of students in these programming courses, however, is always a hot topic during educational gathering held on the country; it is always mentioned that students' performances differ from a university to another and between different regions of the country. The main objective of this research is to investigate the reasons behind the major discrepancies in the performance of students in computer programming course in three main regions of Saudi Arabia: East, West and North. For the purpose of this research, we designed a questionnaire to be filled by a random sample of students from each region considered in this study. The questions on this questioner are related to a set of indices such as socio-economic indices, learning environments indices, and the quality of teaching offered indexes. This paper presents our findings on the difficulties students face while learning computer programming in some regions of Saudi Arabia.