Influência dos enunciados na resolução de problemas de programação introdutória

Most used teaching method in Introductory Programing is the proposition of problems, in which is presented the enunciation with a described problem and, from it is elaborated an algorithm to solve it. There are several difficulties presented, mainly related to the comprehension and interpretation of the enunciation. Analyzing the enunciations presented in textbooks used in Brazil, it was observed that, generally, they are objectives, without evidences of the process of solving and without exemplification, in a purely Mathematics context. In this scenery, it was formulated the research question: the structure and/or context of an enunciation have influence upon the performance of Introductory Programming students in the problem solving? For answer it, research on relevance theory and learning theory and a significant an experiment was carried out in order to test the enunciations, considering context and structure; in the context we used the math, the traditional and the games, the motivator; and for structure was used the non-structured shape, traditional, and structured with complete data. In this experiment, eight classes of students have participated and they are from six Brazilian Higher Education Institution. The students were distributed in four groups, considering the profile and each group solve a type of evaluation and answer a questionnaire. Three analyses were carried out. On the first one, a test of hypothesis was performed, relating the context and the structure with the performance of students, using the logistic regression technique. It was observed statistical difference related to the structure, mainly when the context is math. It was also presented differences related to the student base-performance. On the second analysis was verified the solutions presented and on the third the answers of final questionnaire were analyzed. The worst result was presented by the group which performed the evaluation in non-structured math context, which is the model traditionally used. The best result was on structured math, what lead us to conclude that invest efforts worth in the elaboration of enunciation.