kurvinenProgrammingMisconceptionsIntroductory2016

2016

Programming Misconceptions in an Introductory Level Programming Course Exam

Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education - ITiCSE '16

Learning to program is known to be a difficult task, as the students typically lack the intrinsic motivation and find the new skills required difficult to master. It is hence typical for the educators to try to constantly improve their teaching methods to enhance the quality and outcome of the courses. We have developed an educational tool called ViLLE, which allows us to create interactive and automatically assessed programming exercises easily. In these exercises, the students have a near-toauthentic programming environment with compiler output and error messages provided. The same tool was used in our university’s introductory programming course’s final exam. In this paper, we analyze students’ answers to three different coding exercises in this final exam. Since ViLLE automatically stores the program code when compiled, we have an access to previously unseen amounts of iterations of the exercise instead of just the final submission. The data is analyzed to identify typical misconceptions in programming exercises, and to show how the students gradually improve their answers based on the results and error messages. Finally, we discuss how the results of the analysis can be utilized to tackle these misconceptions during the course.