High School Students` Common Errors in Programming

Identifying and classifying the commonness of errors made by novices learning to write computer programs has long been of interest to both: researchers and educators. Teachers understand the nature of these errors and how students act to correct them, hence more efficient teaching can be performed. Some errors are more frequent than others. In this paper, we examine the most common errors in novice programming of first-year gifted mathematicians in Mathematical Grammar School. Regardless of extensive coverage of these types of errors during the lectures and in learning material, we have noticed that these still persevere when students write programs. Our findings imply that students who usually make all common mistakes have lower marks, but excellent students also make logical errors in conditions for loops. Therefore, we advise more practice in logical thinking with novice programmers and an introduction to formal semantics.