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Work In Progress: CodeCapture: A Tool to Attain Insight into the Programming Development Process

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

Student Division Technical 2: Instruction & Learning Delivery

Page Count

11

DOI

10.18260/1-2--40663

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/40663

Download Count

178

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Paper Authors

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Naman Gulati University of Toronto

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Angy Higgy University of Toronto

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Hamid Timorabadi University of Toronto

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Hamid Timorabadi received his BSc, MASc, and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto. He has worked as a project, design, and test engineer as well as a consultant to industry. His research interests include the application of digital signal processing in energy systems and computer networks. He also has deep interest in engineering education and the use of technology to advance the learning experience of undergraduate students.

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Abstract

Most introductory computer programming courses focus on giving students a good understanding of fundamentals and programmatic problem solving. Programming assignments are a way for students to reinforce these concepts and for instructors to evaluate students’ comprehensions. In a typical assignment, students are given a problem to which they develop a programmatic solution and submit its final iteration for evaluation. Instructors only see this static and final submission, and the decision making or the process of problem solving that led to the final submission is not captured. This paper presents a tool called CodeCapture that periodically captures snapshots of a student’s programming assignment source code over the development period and provides insight into their problem-solving process. Instructors can leverage data provided by this tool to identify areas that students have difficulty. Subsequently, instructors can give insightful feedback to students via a combination of metrics describing students’ development processes, even in a large-scale classroom. In this paper, a discussion on how CodeCapture overcomes gaps in the existing tools is presented. The technical specifications and the trial results from where CodeCapture was able to enrich the feedback to students regarding their assignments is also presented.

Gulati, N., & Higgy, A., & Timorabadi, H. (2022, August), Work In Progress: CodeCapture: A Tool to Attain Insight into the Programming Development Process Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--40663

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