WIP: Characterizing Student Programming Activity

This work-in-progress research paper analyzes student activity as captured by the sequence of programming submissions they make. Although students who complete assignments in a computing course are often assessed in a summative way through the submission of a completed program, their activities during development provide additional insights into their work and problem-solving processes that cannot otherwise be captured. In the context of a data structures & algorithms course taught at the sophomore level, we first examined the number of attempts that students made while completing assignments throughout the semester. We then examined the cumulative portion of the class that had submitted an assignment relative to the due date, and the time periods after assignment release that students are active. Our work helps to illustrate how a programming activity trace provides a unique source of information on how a submission evolves. It was found that even with only feedback as motivation, students made many submissions and that number increased during the semester. Our initial work indicates that a substantial amount of data is available and helps suggest what aspects might provide information useful for further analytics using traditional statistics or machine-learning approaches.