Quantifying students' learning of basic programming constructs using a real-time monitoring approach

النوع : Mémoire

Despite the necessity of systematically acquiring and analyzing data related to the understanding and use of basic programming constructs by first year programm ing students, existing approaches in this context have been limited to online mu ltiple-choice quizzes, code output analysis, and keyword-based analysis of the c ode. These approaches, however, address neither the need for automated code coll ection, nor the importance of analyzing the code to deliver a quantification of the students' understanding of basic programming constructs and their use in a p rogramming assignment; two aspects that can be used to make many important decis ions about the pedagogy and didactics of teaching and assigning first year progr amming tasks. In this work, we have proposed and implemented an action-based eva luation engine to quantify, based on a series of captured code snippets and thei r related actions and structures, the students' understanding of basic programmi ng constructs and their use in a programming assignment. The quantification engi ne was integrated into BlueJ; a representative of first year Integrated Developm ent Environment (IDE) that is used in many universities to teach introductory pr ogramming concepts. To evaluate our quantification engine's effectiveness in pro viding valuable feedback to instructors, we conducted, using our prototype, a re al-time case study that involved first year programming students. Our analysis r evealed many opportunities to identify each student's weaknesses in translating solutions into a set of programming actions as well as determining their structu re in the context of the solution. It also helped us to identify the set of diff icult actions that students were unable to implement in their solutions. Our ana lysis also revealed that our work can be improved and moved forward in many dire ctions that are worth pursuing as future work.