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Helping Students Solve Parsons Puzzles Better

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Amruth N. KumarAuthors Info & Claims

ITiCSE '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

Pages 65 - 70

https://doi.org/10.1145/3304221.3319735

Published: 02 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

In a Parsons puzzle, the student must re-assemble the lines of a program that are provided in scrambled order, and eliminate any distracters included within the scrambled lines of code. We investigated two issues in terms of whether they helped students solve the puzzles better: 1) Would it be better to present distracters and the lines of code of which they are a variant paired together or randomly separated apart? 2) Would telling students that they would not be penalized for any mistakes they make before submitting a complete solution for the first time enable them to get closer to the correct solution when they first submit it? We conducted a controlled study over five semesters and used ANOVA to analyze the data collected from introductory programming students who solved Parsons puzzles on if-else statements. We found that when students were told that their puzzle-solving actions before the first submission would not be penalized, they took significantly more exploratory actions. But, their solution was not significantly closer to being correct. So, trial-and-error exploration was no better for solving Parsons puzzles than deliberate approach. Presenting distracters paired together with the original line of code was found to be beneficial only on the longer puzzle.

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Cited By

Reeves BSarsa SPrather JDenny PBecker BHellas AKimmel BPowell GLeinonen JLaakso MMonga MSimon Sheard J(2023)Evaluating the Performance of Code Generation Models for Solving Parsons Problems With Small Prompt VariationsProceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3587102.3588805(299-305)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3587102.3588805
Fromont FJayamanne HDenny P(2023)Exploring the Difficulty of Faded Parsons Problems for Programming EducationProceedings of the 25th Australasian Computing Education Conference10.1145/3576123.3576136(113-122)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576123.3576136
Ericson BDenny PPrather JDuran RHellas ALeinonen JMiller CMorrison BPearce JRodger SQuille KAlshaigy BBecker BQuille KLaakso M(2022)Parsons Problems and BeyondProceedings of the 2022 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3571785.3574127(191-234)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571785.3574127
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Helping Students Solve Parsons Puzzles Better
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education
        CS1

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cover image ACM Conferences

ITiCSE '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

July 2019

583 pages

ISBN:9781450368957

DOI:10.1145/3304221

General Chairs:
Bruce Scharlau
University of Aberdeen, UK
,
Roger McDermott
Robert Gordon University, UK
,
Program Chairs:
Arnold Pears
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
,
Mihaela Sabin
University of New Hampshire, USA

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 July 2019

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National Science Foundation

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ITiCSE '19

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SIGCSE

ITiCSE '19: Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

July 15 - 17, 2019

Aberdeen, Scotland Uk

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Cited By

Reeves BSarsa SPrather JDenny PBecker BHellas AKimmel BPowell GLeinonen JLaakso MMonga MSimon Sheard J(2023)Evaluating the Performance of Code Generation Models for Solving Parsons Problems With Small Prompt VariationsProceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3587102.3588805(299-305)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3587102.3588805
Fromont FJayamanne HDenny P(2023)Exploring the Difficulty of Faded Parsons Problems for Programming EducationProceedings of the 25th Australasian Computing Education Conference10.1145/3576123.3576136(113-122)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576123.3576136
Ericson BDenny PPrather JDuran RHellas ALeinonen JMiller CMorrison BPearce JRodger SQuille KAlshaigy BBecker BQuille KLaakso M(2022)Parsons Problems and BeyondProceedings of the 2022 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3571785.3574127(191-234)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571785.3574127
Muldner KJennings JChiarelli V(2022)A Review of Worked Examples in Programming ActivitiesACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/356026623:1(1-35)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3560266
Ericson BDenny PPrather JDuran RHellas ALeinonen JMiller CMorrison BPearce JRodger SBecker BQuille KLaakso MBarendsen ESimon (2022)Planning a Multi-institutional and Multi-national Study of the Effectiveness of Parsons ProblemsProceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 210.1145/3502717.3532172(576-577)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502717.3532172
Pustulka EKrause Kde Espona LKennel A(2021)SQL Scrolls - A Reusable and Extensible DGBL ExperimentProceedings of the 10th Computer Science Education Research Conference10.1145/3507923.3507932(39-48)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3507923.3507932
Becker BMooney CKumar ARussell S(2021)A Simple, Language-Independent Approach to Identifying Potentially At-Risk Introductory Programming StudentsProceedings of the 23rd Australasian Computing Education Conference10.1145/3441636.3442318(168-175)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3441636.3442318
Kumar A(2021)Do Students Use Semantics When Solving Parsons Puzzles? – A Log-Based InvestigationIntelligent Tutoring Systems10.1007/978-3-030-80421-3_49(444-450)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80421-3_49
Du YLuxton-Reilly ADenny PLuxton-Reilly ASzabo C(2020)A Review of Research on Parsons ProblemsProceedings of the Twenty-Second Australasian Computing Education Conference10.1145/3373165.3373187(195-202)Online publication date: 3-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373165.3373187

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