Introduction

This chapter reflects on the starting point of the research on programming competency presented in this book. The main motivation is constituted by learners’ well-known challenges in introductory programming education at university. The subsequent section of the introduction contains the goals and research questions of this work. Then the need for programming competency and a competency model is outlined by referring to prior work and projects in the computing education context. The last section of this chapter summarizes the structure of the book.