Precursor skills to writing code

Practice in programming courses is most of the time equated with programming and more specifically with writing code. However, we believe that more emphasis needs to be put in the precursor skills to writing code. Specifically, that there are three phases that students should sequentially master in the process of learning computer programming: code comprehension, code manipulation, and code writing. Further, there are other companion skills, such as understanding technical documentation (i.e., APIs), that should also be stressed in all of the three phases and that are usually overlooked in CS1 courses. In this paper we present an empirical study where we evaluate students in each of these competencies separately. The results obtained are in line with our intuition that code comprehension, code manipulation, and code writing are phases that students should sequentially master in the process of learning to write programs.