poster

On How Novices Approach Programming Exercises Before and During Coding

Authors:

Juan Pablo Saenz,

Luigi De RussisAuthors Info & Claims

CHI EA '22: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts

Article No.: 361, Pages 1 - 6

https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519655

Published: 28 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Various tools and approaches are available to support undergraduate students learning to program. Most of them concentrate on the code and aim to ease the visualization of data structures or guide the debugging. However, in undergraduate introductory courses, students are typically given exercises in the form of a natural language problem. Deriving a correct solution largely depends on the problem-solving strategy they adopt rather than on their proficiency in dealing with the syntax and semantics of the code. Indeed, they face various challenges (apart from the coding), such as identifying the relevant information, stating the algorithmic steps to solve it, breaking it into smaller parts, and evaluating the implemented solution. To our knowledge, almost no attention has been paid to supporting such problem-solving strategies before and during the coding. This paper reports an interview and a sketching exercise with 10 participants exploring how the novices approach the programming exercises from a problem-solving perspective and how they imagine a tool to support their cognitive process. Findings show that students intuitively perform various actions over the exercise text, and they would appreciate having support from the development environment. Accordingly, based on these findings, we provide implications for designing tools to support problem-solving strategies.

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Cited By

Gilbert CMcDonald BScott M(2024)Exploring the Relationship between Debugging Self-Efficacy and CASE Tools for Novice TroubleshootingProceedings of the 2024 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research10.1145/3689535.3689556(1-7)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689535.3689556
Hou XWu ZWang XEricson BJoyner DKim MWang XXia M(2024)CodeTailor: LLM-Powered Personalized Parsons Puzzles for Engaging Support While Learning ProgrammingProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3657604.3662032(51-62)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3657604.3662032
Obionwu COji Kalu KBlockhaus PBroneske DSaake G(2023)A Strategy for Retrospective Evaluation of Students SQL Learning Engagements2023 3rd International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering (ICECCME)10.1109/ICECCME57830.2023.10252347(1-7)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICECCME57830.2023.10252347

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On How Novices Approach Programming Exercises Before and During Coding

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI EA '22: Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2022

3066 pages

ISBN:9781450391566

DOI:10.1145/3491101

Editors:
Simone Barbosa
PUC-Rio, Brazil
,
Cliff Lampe
University of Michigan, USA
,
Caroline Appert
Université Paris-Saclay, France
,
David A. Shamma
Toyota Research Institute, USA

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Published: 28 April 2022

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Cited By

Gilbert CMcDonald BScott M(2024)Exploring the Relationship between Debugging Self-Efficacy and CASE Tools for Novice TroubleshootingProceedings of the 2024 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research10.1145/3689535.3689556(1-7)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689535.3689556
Hou XWu ZWang XEricson BJoyner DKim MWang XXia M(2024)CodeTailor: LLM-Powered Personalized Parsons Puzzles for Engaging Support While Learning ProgrammingProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3657604.3662032(51-62)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3657604.3662032
Obionwu COji Kalu KBlockhaus PBroneske DSaake G(2023)A Strategy for Retrospective Evaluation of Students SQL Learning Engagements2023 3rd International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering (ICECCME)10.1109/ICECCME57830.2023.10252347(1-7)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICECCME57830.2023.10252347

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