Through the Eyes of a Programmer:A Research Project on how to Foster Programming Education with Eye-Tracking Technology

Nowadays, there is a high demand for programming expertise on the labor market. New technologies such as eye tracking could help to improve programming education and thereby help to fulfill this demand. For instance, Eye Movement Modeling Examples (EMMEs) are learning videos that visualize a person’s (the model’s) eye movements while s/he demonstrates how to perform a (programming) task. The eye movements can, for in-stance, get visualized as moving dots onto a screen recording. By observing where an expert programmer looks, programming beginners might better understand what s/he is doing and referring to. Recent studies showed promising first results about the beneficial effects of using EMMEs in programming education. In this manuscript, we present a research project that aims to provide evidence-based guidelines for educational practitioners on how to use eye-tracking technology for programming training. We first introduce the basic concept of EMMEs and exemplary gaps in literature. We then present our first empirical study on how different instructions affect expert programmer’s eye movements when modeling a debugging task (and hence EMME displays). With this manuscript, we hope to inspire more programmers to use eye-tracking technology for programming education

Through the Eyes of a Programmer: A Research Project on how to Foster Programming Education with Eye-Tracking Technology

Nowadays, there is a high demand for programming expertise on the labor market. New technologies such as eye tracking could help to improve programming education and thereby help to fulfill this demand. For instance, Eye Movement Modeling Examples (EMMEs) are learning videos that visualize a person’s (the model’s) eye movements while s/he demonstrates how to perform a (programming) task. The eye movements can, for in-stance, get visualized as moving dots onto a screen recording. By observing where an expert programmer looks, programming beginners might better understand what s/he is doing and referring to. Recent studies showed promising first results about the beneficial effects of using EMMEs in programming education. In this manuscript, we present a research project that aims to provide evidence-based guidelines for educational practitioners on how to use eye-tracking technology for programming training. We first introduce the basic concept of EMMEs and exemplary gaps in literature. We then present our first empirical study on how different instructions affect expert programmer’s eye movements when modeling a debugging task (and hence EMME displays). With this manuscript, we hope to inspire more programmers to use eye-tracking technology for programming education