BibTeX:
@inproceedings{karvelas2020compile, author = {Karvelas, Ioannis and Dillane, Joe and Becker, Brett A.}, title = {Compile Much? A Closer Look at the Programming Behavior of Novices in Different Compilation and Error Message Presentation Contexts}, year = {2020}, isbn = {9781450388498}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3416465.3416471}, doi = {10.1145/3416465.3416471}, abstract = { Learning to program is a process that relies on learning theoretical fundamentals as well as practice, and almost always involves some type of programming environment. In order to build effective environments that support good learning for novices, it is important to explore the interaction between novices and these environments. A variety of feedback mechanisms are employed by various environments in use in classrooms today. Some, such as text-based error messages are common to almost all. Other interaction mechanisms, such as invoking the compiler, can vary rather drastically. In this study we investigate the difference between BlueJ 3 and BlueJ 4, two versions of a pedagogical programming environment that offer different mechanisms for compilation and error message presentation. We find evidence that these differences provide users with fundamentally different programming experiences. Specifically, we find that programming process data produced by BlueJ 3 users follow a very deterministic distribution compared to BlueJ 4. Based on this, we present a formula that describes the behaviour of BlueJ 3 users in terms of compilation and error metrics. Conversely, we demonstrate that BlueJ 4 allows users to interact more freely in terms of compilation mechanism as well as how they receive error messages, and their quantity. Which is more beneficial to novices however, is an open question.}, booktitle = {United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research Conference.}, pages = {59–65}, numpages = {7}, keywords = {novice programmers, tools, Blackbox, editors, programming, programming environments, educational data mining, BlueJ, IDE, compiler error messages, CS1, programming process data}, location = {Glasgow, United Kingdom}, series = {UKICER '20} }