C Programming: Relevant Exercises for Engineering Students Using Bloom's Taxonomy

A program is a set of instructions that tell the computers how to accomplish a given task. C is one of the high-level programming languages that is mostly used for system programming to write embedded system software that interact with hardware. Past assessments and random interviews showed that students from Foundation Engineering Program, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia face some difficulties in learning the concept of C programming. Therefore, this study was conducted to help the students in learning C programming. The objective of this paper is to frame out a set of C programming exercise using blooms taxonomy that suite with the students' level. A quantitative research was carried out where by as many as 105 students were involved in answering questionnaires and creating their own set of questions on a specific chapter given. From the set of questions created by the students, it showed that most of the questions fall under the first four levels of bloom's taxonomy which is remember, understanding, application and analysis. Thus, a set of exercise was framed out by implementing Bloom's Taxonomy that accord with the student's level. The new set of exercise was then answered by 82 students and their performance was evaluated to see whether the exercises are relevant to their level or not. Findings revealed that 75% of the scores fall above the first quartile (score = 59.64) which means the set of exercises is relevant to the students' level because most of them were able to answer the exercises.