PRIMM is an approach to planning programming lessons and activities and includes the following stages: Predict, Run, Investigate, Modify and Make. In this approach, rather than copying code or writing programs from scratch, beginners instead start by focussing on reading working code.
The five stages of PRIMM are used in planning lessons and activities and are designed to support learners at all stages of learning programming in school, not just complete beginners. More recently, we’ve been investigating the role of language in the programming classroom.
Sentance, S., & Waite, J. (2021, August). Teachers’ Perspectives on Talk in the Programming Classroom: Language as a Mediator. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (pp. 266-280). https://doi.org/10.1145/3446871.3469751
Sentance, S., Waite, J., & Kallia, M. (2019, February). Teachers’ Experiences of using PRIMM to Teach Programming in School. In Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (pp. 476-482). https://doi.org/10.1145/3287324.3287477
Sentance, S., Waite, J., & Kallia, M. (2019). Teaching computer programming with PRIMM: a sociocultural perspective. Computer Science Education, 29(2-3), 136-176. https://doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2019.1608781
Sentance, S., & Waite, J. (2017, November). PRIMM: Exploring pedagogical approaches for teaching text-based programming in school. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education (pp. 113-114). https://doi.org/10.1145/3137065.3137084