The Stores Model of Code Cognition

Program comprehension is perhaps one of the oldest topics within the psychology of programming. It addresses a central issue: how programmers work with and manipulate source code to construct effective software systems. Models can play an important role in understanding the challenges developers and engineers contend with. This paper presents a model of program comprehension, or code cognition, which has been derived from literature found within the disciplines of computing and psychology. Drawing on direct experimentation, this paper argues that a model of code cognition should take account of the visual, spatial and linguistic abilities of developers. The strengths and weaknesses of this model are discussed and further research directions presented

Plan-based delivery composition in intelligent tutoring systems for introductory computer programming

In a shell system for the generation of intelligent tutoring systems, the instructional model that one applies should be variable independent of the content of instruction. In this article, a taxonomy of content elements is presented in order to define a relatively content-independent instructional planner for introductory programming ITS's; the taxonomy is based on the concepts of programming goals and programming plans. Deliveries may be composed by the instantiation of delivery templates with the content elements. Examples from two different instructional models illustrate the flexibility of this approach. All content in the examples is taken from a course in COMAL-80 turtle graphics

A Comprehensive Review on Software Comprehension Models

Software comprehension is one of the most important among software development tasks since most developers do not start a brand new software every time they switch jobs or get transferred from one project to another but join long-running software projects. Every experienced and expert developer has their own established methods of understanding complex software systems. These methods might be different for everyone but they still have common aspects by which multiple well-defined code comprehension models can be constructed. Furthermore, the degree of understanding of a software can be categorized as well, according to the ability of the programmer to modify or develop a certain part of the software system. This paper is intended to provide a review of the cognitive software comprehension models established by extensive research in this topic as well as describe the dimensions of understanding software. It also determines the editor support of cognition models by examining common editor functionalities and categorizing code editors based on the availability of functionalities of each cognition approach

Beacons and Novice Programming Comprehension

Computer Science courses at tertiary level have one of the highest drop-out rates internationally. One of the main issues for this high attrition rate is often seen as CS1, the first Computer Science module usually encountered by students, which has a strong emphasis on computer programming. In order to aid students in the steep learning curve associated with programming, many different techniques have been utilised, to a varied degree of success. This paper aims to discover if particular lines of programming code exist that can help readers easily identify its functionality - referred to as a “beacon”. In a program containing a sort function, for example, advanced programmers might observe the swap code inside a loop and comprehend that it is a sorting algorithm, and therefore a beacon, without much further examination. This paper details the first phase of a study examining the presence of beacons in CS1 standard Java code using eye-tracking technology. In particular this paper will focus on the collection of data from non-novice programmers to determine whether or not beacons can be detected. Participants in this study were presented with basic Java programs and were asked to determine, from a list of possible options, what output was correct. Data was collected using an eye-tracking devices during a phase of experimentation and this data was subsequently analysed. From the analysis we were able to detect some beacons did exist in the code. In the future, some method of displaying these beacons could potentially be implemented as a form of intervention to aid students within the initial stages of learning a programming language

Beacons and Novice Programming Comprehension

Computer Science courses at tertiary level have one of the highest drop-out rates internationally. One of the main issues for this high attrition rate is often seen as CS1, the first Computer Science module usually encountered by students, which has a strong emphasis on computer programming. In order to aid students in the steep learning curve associated with programming, many different techniques have been utilised, to a varied degree of success. This paper aims to discover if particular lines of programming code exist that can help readers easily identify its functionality - referred to as a “beacon”. In a program containing a sort function, for example, advanced programmers might observe the swap code inside a loop and comprehend that it is a sorting algorithm, and therefore a beacon, without much further examination. This paper details the first phase of a study examining the presence of beacons in CS1 standard Java code using eye-tracking technology. In particular this paper will focus on the collection of data from non-novice programmers to determine whether or not beacons can be detected. Participants in this study were presented with basic Java programs and were asked to determine, from a list of possible options, what output was correct. Data was collected using an eye-tracking devices during a phase of experimentation and this data was subsequently analysed. From the analysis we were able to detect some beacons did exist in the code. In the future, some method of displaying these beacons could potentially be implemented as a form of intervention to aid students within the initial stages of learning a programming language