Using Tracing and Sketching to Solve Programming Problems: Replicating and Extending an Analysis of What Students Draw

Kathryn Cunningham; Sarah Blanchard; Barbara Ericson; Mark Guzdial

doi:10.1145/3105726.3106190

Using Tracing and Sketching to Solve Programming Problems: Replicating and Extending an Analysis of What Students Draw

Kathryn Cunningham
, Sarah Blanchard
, Barbara Ericson
, Mark Guzdial

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Abstract

Sketching out a code trace is a cognitive assistance for programmers, student and professional. Previous research (Lister et al. 2004) showed that students who sketch a trace on paper had greater success on code 'reading' problems involving loops, arrays, and conditionals. We replicated this finding, and developed further categories of student sketching strategies. Our results support previous findings that students who don't sketch on code reading problems have a lower success rate than students who do sketch. We found that students who sketch incomplete traces also have a low success rate, similar to students who don't sketch at all. We categorized sketching strategies on new problem types (code writing, code ordering, and code fixing) and find that different types of sketching are used on these problems, not always with increased success. We ground our results in a theory of sketching as a method for distributing cognition and as a demonstration of the process of the notional machine.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	ICER 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
Pages	164-172
Number of pages	9
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450349680
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3105726.3106190
State	Published - Aug 2017
Externally published	Yes
Event	13th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, ICER 2017 - Tacoma, United States Duration: Aug 18 2017 → Aug 20 2017

Other

Other	13th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, ICER 2017
Country/Territory	United States
City	Tacoma
Period	8/18/17 → 8/20/17

Keywords

CS1
Distributed cognition
Notional machine
Novice programmers
Sketching
Tracing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computational Theory and Mathematics
Computer Science Applications
Software
Education

Online availability

10.1145/3105726.3106190

Library availability

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Cite this

Cunningham, K., Blanchard, S., Ericson, B., & Guzdial, M. (2017). Using Tracing and Sketching to Solve Programming Problems: Replicating and Extending an Analysis of What Students Draw. In ICER 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (pp. 164-172). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3105726.3106190

Using Tracing and Sketching to Solve Programming Problems: Replicating and Extending an Analysis of What Students Draw. / Cunningham, Kathryn; Blanchard, Sarah; Ericson, Barbara et al.
ICER 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research. Association for Computing Machinery, 2017. p. 164-172.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Cunningham, K, Blanchard, S, Ericson, B & Guzdial, M 2017, Using Tracing and Sketching to Solve Programming Problems: Replicating and Extending an Analysis of What Students Draw. in ICER 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research. Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 164-172, 13th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, ICER 2017, Tacoma, United States, 8/18/17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3105726.3106190

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Using Tracing and Sketching to Solve Programming Problems: Replicating and Extending an Analysis of What Students Draw

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Keywords

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