data collection and learning analytics in programming education

Programming Assessment and

Data Collection

Petri Ihantola

Programming Assessment and

Data Collection

Petri IhantolaAssistant Professor at Tampere University of Technology (2014 - ), D.Sc. (Tech) from Aalto University in 2011, Software Engineer in Test at Google (2007-2009), Teaching various large-class programming courses at Aalto University, former Helsinki University of Technology (2004 - 2014)

Arto Vihavainen, Ville Karavirta, Juha Helminen,

Juha Sorva, Otto Seppälä, ...

image: http://www.fatandsassymama.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/baking.jpg

Programming is a process

Programming is a process

Feedback should be provided from how students do what they do, not only whether

the end product tastes good or not

Traditionally, feedback has focused on the end products

image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/clement127/15004844674 cc (by-nc-nd)

Traditionally, feedback has focused on the end products

correctness, efficiency, style, design, ...

Ala-Mutka. A survey of automated assessment approaches for programming assignments. Computer Science Education, 15(2):83-102, 2005.

May encourage ineffective trial and error processes

image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/oliveira_comp/14261335089 cc (by-nc-sa)

May encourage ineffective trial and error processes tackled by limiting the number of

submissions/feedback, using time penalties, making each exercise unique,

organizing contests, ... Ihantola et al. 2010. Review of recent systems for automatic assessment of programming assignments. In Proceedings of the 10th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research. 86-93.

Hey, wait a moment... isn't this already already an example of providing

feedback from the proces

So what makes it hard to provide even better feedback

(from processes)?

So what makes it hard to provide even better feedback

(from processes)?

Systems collect data

But when trying to get the big picture, we still have to do many assumptions

image: unknown

image: unknown

Houston, we have a problem

image: NASA, PD

Let's look at easier problems first

Ihantola & Karavirta (2011). Two-Dimensional Parson’s Puzzles: The Concept, Tools, and First Observations. In: Journal of Information Technology Education: Innovations in Practice 10, pp. 1–14.

Helminen, Ihantola, Karavirta, Malmi (2012). How Do Students Solve Parsons Programming Problems? – An Analysis of Interaction Traces. In Proceedings of the 8th International Computing Education Research Conference, pp. 119–126, Auckland, New Zealand.Karavirta, Helminen, Ihantola (2012). A mobile learning application for parsons problems with automatic feedback. In: Koli Calling ’12: Proceedings of the 12th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research. Koli, Finland: ACM, pp. 11–18. ISBN: 978-1-4503-1795-5. (best system paper award)

Looks like the student got stuck here, lets

help.

Back to real life and real programming environments

Back to real life and real programming environments

How much information is lost when storing snapshots

at different granularities?

submissions, save points, key-strokes

Vihavainen, Luukkainen & Ihantola. 2014. Analysis of source code snapshot granularity levels. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference on Information technology education (SIGITE '14). ACM

Novice programmers

image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donnieray/8658314801/ cc (by)

● Introduction to Programming (MOOC)● Spring 2014, University of Helsinki● 1166 students● 93231 submissions● 1.3 million saves, runs and tests● 37 million events (insert, remove, paste)

Novice programmers

● 50% of students work on assignments that they never submit - no information on the progress in such (harder?) assignments

● Programmers with previous experience move more straightforward (make less sidesteps)

● 6.3 snapshots / submission and 30 key events / snapshot

Some findings

So... collect the data while you can. It cannot be regenerated, e.g., interpolated.

Any examples of what to do with more accurate data?

Can we automatically detect student’s perceived difficulty

as they are working on programming tasks?

Petri Ihantola, Juha Sorva, and Arto Vihavainen. 2014. Automatically detectable indicators of programming assignment difficulty. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference on Information technology education (SIGITE '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 33-38. (best paper award)

Can we understand how the way of how students type

their code evolves over time?

Arto Vihavainen, Juha Helminen, and Petri Ihantola. 2014. How novices tackle their first lines of code in an IDE: analysis of programming session traces. In Proceedings of the 14th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli Calling '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 109-116.

What next?

The three main goals of feedback are to help a learner understand and learn about

1. the learning goals2. own progress towards these goals3. activities needed to make better process

Hattie & Timperley (2007). The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112.

Time perspective in educational data mining will change to more fine grained

Plenty of research opportunities from course-level analysis to modeling

individual students

However, we should not ignore the vast amount of

previous research

e.g., Juha Helminen, Petri Ihantola, and Ville Karavirta. 2013. Recording and analyzing in-browser programming sessions. In Proceedings of the 13th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli Calling '13). 13-22.

ITiCSE working group in July

https://us.pycon.org/2015/events/edusummit/

Python Education Summitvoting of the topics is open

Thank You!petri.ihantola@tut.fi @ihantolawww.linkedin.com/in/ihantolatinyurl.com/PetriPublications