Abstract:
Syntactically correct code does not fall from the sky; for beginning programmers, the process that leads to a student’s first executable program is not well understood. We have begun to explore the behaviors that students exhibit while authoring code by focusing on when and what they choose to compile. By examining these compilation behaviors, we have determined the most common errors encountered in-class by students using BlueJ in our introductory course on object-oriented programming at Kent, how they tend to program when in supervised laboratory sessions, and identified future directions of study driven by our initial observations. Our goal is to apply this research to the future development of BlueJ and instructional methodologies involving it’s use in the classroom.
PPIG 2004 - 16th Annual Workshop
first look at novice compilation behavior using BlueJ