Set the right example when teaching programming: Test Informed Learning with Examples (TILE)

Many educators face problems with integrating testing into programming education. For instance: existing courses are already fully packed; testing requires skills that students might not yet have; and testing is, although considered important, not always given priority by students. Educators, in general, do not have time to overhaul a programming course to fully integrate testing, resulting in a situation in which the improvement of testing education seems to have slowed down. In this paper, we propose Test Informed Learning with Examples (TILE), a new concept to create test-awareness in introductory programming courses. TILE aims to introduce testing as early as possible and in a subtle way. As a result, integration into existing curricula can be done seamlessly and requires less effort than completely overhauling existing programming courses. The contributions of this paper are: the presentation of TILE; experiences of having applied this method in the classroom; and an open repository with assignments using our approach. Applying TILE seems to be a promising approach to introduce testing in early programming. Moreover, some TILEs can be added to existing courses with almost no effort from day one. More research is needed to gain confidence in the benefits of using TILE over time and to collect evidence that we reached the final aim of TILE, i.e. students that test because that inherently belongs to programming, and not because it is explicitly asked from them.