P. O. Box 4466, Brasília-df, cep 70910-900, Brazil

1. Introduction
New software engineers and casual developers are needed in many different areas. How-
ever, students face many difficulties while learning the logic of computer programming, 
frequently failing in university courses.
*
Corresponding author: [e-mail]; tel.: [phone]

---

E.D. Canedo, G.A. Santos, L.L. Leite
46
The teaching-learning methodology adopted in the Introduction to Computer Science 
classes may be a process that makes it difficult to understand the principles of program-
ming language for undergraduate students in Computer Science and related areas, gen-
erating high failure and drop out rates.
There are myriads of proposals and research related to the fields of Engineering, 
Technology, and Education, with the objective of making available resources and con-
texts that help professors and students make learning more effective. As for the leaning 
of programming languages, the advances in this research context are easily identifiable, 
with countless tools and environments presented as proposals for better learning. The 
works proposed by (Martins et al., 2010), (Edgcomb et al., 2017) and (Bosse and Ge-
rosa, 2017) present some of these tools and problems.
Regardless of the countless resources and tools in existence, at the University of Bra-
sília (UnB), we concluded that a high number of failing students in the basic program-
ming course is a reality for our undergraduate courses. 
The results show that it is necessary to seek new teaching-learning proposals to 
introduce the concepts of programming language for the students of Engineering (Au-
tomotive, Aerospace, Energy, Electronic, Electrical, Mechanical, Communication Net-
work, and Mechatronics) and Computing courses, seeking to reduce the number of 
failures and dropouts.
This paper presents an analysis of the results obtained in the Introduction to Com-
puter Science (ICC), Basic Computing (CB) and Algorithms and Computer Program-
ming (APC) subjects, taught for these courses at University of Brasilia (UnB), between 
2008.2 and 2017.1.
Besides that, a survey in the form of a questionnaire is also given to the students 
of the current semester, 2017.2, regarding the teaching techniques adopted by the pro-
fessors of the subject, with the objective of identifying improvements in the teaching-
learning process.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the related 
work. Section 3 presents the analysis of the scenario of the ICC, CB and APC subjects. 
Section 4 presents the evaluation and analysis of results obtained with the survey given 
to UnB students. Section 5 presents the conclusions and future studies.