Research on eye tracking during program comprehension

Abstract

In recent years, programming education has been attracting attention. Programming education will become compulsory in elementary schools from 2020, and will be enriched in junior high school technology classes in 2021. Information I classes will be implemented as a common compulsory subject in high schools from 2022, and Information I will be newly added to the Common University Entrance Examination in 2025. For these reasons, it is expected that the number of programming learners will increase in the future, and discussion on programming learning is urgently needed. Understanding the basic control structure of a program is an important item in programming learning. Basic control structures include sequential, iterative, and branching, and by combining these, it is possible to write programs that perform various operations. In other words, understanding basic control structures and predicting the behavior of a program is the first step in learning programming. However, understanding individual control structures at the syntax level does not mean understanding the behavior of the program. Therefore, we created a program with a complex structure that combined multiple control structures and performed eye tracking. This eye tracking enabled us to evaluate the learner's understanding of the control structure.departmental bulletin pape