Another look at the behaviors of novice programmers

Abstract

This paper reports on the progress of an NSF funded research project investigating the development practices of students in introductory programming courses. In previous work, we describe our extension of the BlueJ IDE to capture events associated with program development. Here we report on data collected during the Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 semesters on CS 1 students. In particular, we show that our data analysis independently confirms the results obtained in separate studies by Jadud [3, 2]. In addition we use our empirical evidence to discern some higher level "patterns" of beginning student programming behaviors including potential cheating and the impact on success of students starting projects late.