Compilable States

How novice programmers navigate through errors, length of pauses, and states of compilation while writing a program can provide valuable information in computing education research. In this paper, we analyze keystroke datasets collected from assignments of the CS1 course from 44 students from Utah State University. We propose a metric called Average Known Recovery (AKR) to measure and understand the efficiency of students who could resolve their code faster after knowing their program is in an uncompilable state. Surprisingly, we discovered longer pauses were more common in the executable states instead of error states. This suggests that longer pauses are not only driven by the cognitive load or frustration of being in an uncompilable state. Visualization of cursor positions for each event, along with states of compilability, helps to explore the programming flow of students for a particular assignment. These findings can be helpful in designing programming pedagogy and intervention strategies to help novice programmers.