This paper focuses on a historically understudied area in computing education: attending to students' *design thinking* in university-level introductory programming courses. I offer an account of one student--"Rebecca"--and her experiences and code from a second-semester course on programming concepts for engineers. Using data from both…

Viewing worked examples before problem solving has been shown to improve learning efficiency in novice programming. Example-based feedback seeks to present smaller, adaptive worked example steps during problem solving. We present a method for automatically generating and selecting adaptive, example-based programming feedback using historical…

Open-ended tasks are common in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. However, as far as we know, no tools have been developed to assist in the assessment of the solution process of open-ended questions. In this paper, we propose the use of analysis of traces as a tool to address this need. To illustrate this approach,…

Early prediction of student difficulty during long-duration learning activities allows a tutoring system to intervene by providing needed support, such as a hint, or by alerting an instructor. To be effective, these predictions must come early and be highly accurate, but such predictions are difficult for open-ended programming problems. In this…

In this paper we present a novel, data-driven algorithm for generating feedback for students on open-ended programming problems. The feedback goes beyond next-step hints, annotating a student's whole program with suggested edits, including code that should be moved or reordered. We also build on existing work to design a methodology for evaluating…