Directing Novice Programmers Gaze While Understanding Source Code To Get Better Understanding

 

Background: Teaching well is a craft like any other, and success often comes from an accumulation of small improvements rather than from any single large change. There have been many studies on teaching and learning of programming. In the past, there have been many studies to explore how programmers understand source code (Peitek et al., 2020, 2018). In a recent study we observed the visualization patterns for participants when comprehending source code snippets, and found that there is a difference in focus points for correct and incorrect responses for participants, which indicates that participants within correct answers require more effort in the computing method to comprehend the snippet, or that they used bottom-up comprehension and failed to fully understand a snippet.

Objective: Overarching aim of this study is to improve the programming language education, goal of this study is to find if we can direct the gaze of novice students to help them get better understanding ofthe source code and become proficient in programming.

Method: We conduct an eye-tracking study to record students’ visual attention as they comprehend simple programs. The study is divided into two parts, in the first part we collect the focus point of students with correct responses, in the second part we direct students’ attention to those areas of interest and observe whether these directed snippets help students with better comprehension of programs.

Expected Results: We hope to find that we can guide novices to get a correct grasp of source code snippets and tasks and become proficient in programming

 

Contact persons arooba.aqeel@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de