The recent trend of embedding source code for machine learning applications also enables new opportunities in learning analytics in programming education, but which code embedding approach is most suitable for learning analytics remains an open question. A common approach to embedding source code lies in extracting syntactic information from a…

Background: With the development of computational literacy, there has been a surge in both research and practice application of text-based and block-based modalities within the field of computer programming education. Despite this trend, little work has actually examined how learners engaging in programming process when utilizing these two major…

Educational data mining involves the application of data mining techniques to student activity. However, in the context of computer programming, many data mining techniques can not be applied because they require vector-shaped input, whereas computer programs have the form of syntax trees. In this paper, we present ast2vec, a neural network that…

Educators who teach programming subjects are often wondering "which programming language should I teach first?" The debate behind this question has a long history and coming up with a definite answer to this question would be farfetched. Nonetheless, several efforts can be identified in the literature wherein pros and cons of mainstream…

This paper presents the first experiences of the use of an online open-source repository with programming exercises. The repository is independent of any specific teaching approach. Students can search for and select an exercise that trains the programming concepts that they want to train and that only uses the programming concepts they already…

The study of the relationships between self-regulated learning and formative assessment is an active line of research in the educational community. A recent review of the literature highlights that the study of these connections has been mainly unidirectional, focusing on how formative assessment helps students to self-regulate their learning,…

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to combine domain modelling and student modelling techniques in a single, automated pipeline which does not require expert knowledge and can be used to predict future student performance. Domain modelling techniques map questions to concepts and student modelling techniques generate a mastery score for a…

Knowledge components (KCs) have many applications. In computing education, knowing the demonstration of specific KCs has been challenging. This paper introduces an entirely data-driven approach for: (1) discovering KCs; and (2) demonstrating KCs, using students' actual code submissions. Our system is based on two expected properties of KCs: (1)…

Aim/Purpose: This paper focuses on designing and implementing the rubric for objective JAVA programming assessments. An unsupervised learning approach was used to group learners based on their performance in the results obtained from the rubric, reflecting their learning ability. Background: Students' learning outcomes have been evaluated…

As students learn how to program, both their programming code and their understanding of it evolves over time. In this work, we present a general data-driven approach, named "Temporal-ASTNN" for modeling student learning progression in open-ended programming domains. Temporal-ASTNN combines a novel neural network model based on abstract…

The recent shift in compulsory education from ICT-focused computing curricula to informatics, digital literacy and computer science, has resulted in children being taught computing using block-based programming tools such as Scratch, with teaching that is often limited by school resources and teacher expertise. Even without these limitations,…