Programme / Paper

Abstract

What kind of errors do beginners make? Objective answers to this question are essential to the design and implementation of curricula that don't just reflect the educators' theories but succeed in conveying a course's topics and skills to the students. In the context of a new introductory programming course based on “inverted curriculum” ideas, and taking advantage of our ability to instrument the compiler, we performed automatic analysis of the — sometimes contorted — paths students actually take to solve programming exercises on their own. The results, collected from three different groups of students across two unrelated universities, included a number of surprises. These findings will help improve future sessions of the course, and are being used in the design and implementation of an Intelligent Tutoring System.