A teacher's objective is to provide students the cognitive strategies that enable them to think critically, make decisions, and solve problems. In order to guide student learning, teachers should be aware of the concepts that are prerequisite to the understanding of others and also of typical student misconceptions. The goal of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a pedagogical approach suitable for online learning: instructor-guided online group discussion blended into a hybrid (traditional and online) lecture-lab introductory programming course to enhance the problem-solving ability of students. A pretest posttest control group design was used; the test comprised of drill-and-practice items and critical thinking items involving problems. The data was analyzed using the t-test groups and yielded insightful results.