Various similarity measures for source code have been proposed, many rely on edit- or tree-distance. To support a lecturer in quickly assessing live or online exercises with respect to "approaches taken by the students," we compare source code on a more abstract, semantic level. Even if novice student's solutions follow the same idea,…

Studies have shown that students have different help-seeking behavior patterns and tendencies and furthermore, that students with certain help-seeking behavior patterns and tendencies may have poor performance (i.e., at-risk students). This study applied an educational data mining approach, including clustering and classification, to analyze…

Object-oriented programming distinguishes between instance attributes and methods and class attributes and methods, annotated by the "static" modifier. Novices encounter difficulty understanding the means and implications of "static" attributes and methods. The paper has two outcomes: (a) a detailed classification of aspects of…

In programming problem solving activities, sometimes, students need feedback to progress in the course, being positively affected by the received feedback. This paper presents an overview of the state of the art and practice of the feedback approaches on introductory programming. To this end, we have carried out a systematic literature mapping to…

In this study, we developed a classification system of programming errors based on the historical data of 680,540 programming records collected on the Online Judge platform. The classification system described six types of programming errors (i.e., syntax, logical, type, writing, misunderstanding, and runtime errors) and their connections with…

The employment rate of software developers has risen significantly over the last 30 years. As a result, more students are considering computer science as a potential career path. Over the last 15 years, introductory programming course (CS1) enrollment has been increasing at a much faster rate than the increase in the number of CS faculty, with no…

How to support students in programming learning has been a great research challenge in the last years. To address this challenge, prior works have mainly focused on proposing solutions based on syntactic analysis to provide students with personalized feedback about their grammatical programming errors and misconceptions. However, syntactic…

Courses on computer programming are included in the curricula of almost all engineering disciplines. We surveyed the research literature and identified the techniques that are commonly used by instructors for teaching these courses. We observed that visual programming and game-based learning can enhance computational thinking and problem-solving…

Programming education has recently received increased attention due to growing demand for programming and information technology skills. However, a lack of teaching materials and human resources presents a major challenge to meeting this demand. One way to compensate for a shortage of trained teachers is to use machine learning techniques to…

This study discusses and presents various strategies employed by novice programmers concerning exception handling. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: we provide an analysis tool to measure the level of assimilation of exception handling mechanism; we present and analyse strategies to handle exceptions; we present and analyse…

It is important for students to develop critical thinking and other higher-order thinking skills during their tertiary studies. Along with the ability to think critically comes the need to develop students' meta-cognitive skills. These abilities work together to enable students to control, monitor, and regulate their own cognitive processes and…

The 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2017) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Optics Velley Kingdom Plaza Hotel, Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China. This years conference features two invited talks by: Dr. Jie Tang, Associate Professor with the Department of Computer…

The 9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2016) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Sheraton Raleigh Hotel, in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, in the USA. The conference, held June 29-July 2, 2016, follows the eight previous editions (Madrid 2015, London 2014, Memphis…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…