EclipseMonitor: A Real-Time Student Programming Environment Data Collection Tool
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Coding assignments and code-based problem-solving are central to CS education. They are also the least visible to instructors. Students working on larger CS problems typically do so individually or in small teams with most of their effort taking place on their systems and in their own time. This lack of visibility can make it difficult for us to understand how students approach larger coding problems; when they develop and modify their coding plan; how they respond to errors; and what specific events trigger them to seek help. While we can monitor students’ overall progress and general struggles based on commits and help requests this data can give us an incomplete picture of their effort. However by tracking students’ coding actions we can evaluate how they approach both high- and low-level coding challenges, evaluate their overall coding processes, and we can better identify opportunities for tailored feedback. We describe the development of EclipseMonitor, an open-source tool for the analysis of students’ real-time coding activities and we discuss insights that we have obtained from its evaluation in a large CS2 course.