In Java, "System.out.printf" and "String.format" consume a specialised kind of string commonly known as a format string. In our study of first-year students at the Ateneo de Manila University, we discovered that format strings present a substantial challenge for novice programmers. Focusing on their first laboratory we found…

Syntactically correct code does not fall from the sky; the process that leads to a student's first executable program is not well understood. At the University of Kent we have begun to explore the "compilation behaviours" of novice programmers, or the behaviours that students exhibit while authoring code; in our initial study, we have…