Exploring Problem Solving Paths in a Java Programming Course

Assessment of students’ programming submissions has been the focus of interest in many studies. Although the final submissions capture the whole program, they often tell very little about how it was developed. In this paper, we are able to look at intermediate programming steps using a unique dataset that captures a series of snapshots showing how students developed their program over time. We assessed each of these intermediate steps and performed a fine-grained concept-based analysis on each step to identify the most common programming paths. Analysis of results showed that most of the students tend to incrementally build the program and improve its correctness. This finding provides us with evidence that intermediate programming steps are important, and need to be taken into account for not only improving user modelling in educational programming systems, but also for providing better feedback to students

Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming. This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research