Konferenzbeitrag
How Novice Programmers Become Experienced: A Longitudinal Study
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Datum
2020
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Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.
Zusammenfassung
Reading and understanding source code is the daily basis of every programmer. Depite descades of research, the underlying cognitive mechanisms for reading and understanding source code are not fully understood. One of the aspects that drive these cognitive processes is the reading order: While experts follow the execution flow of source code, novices read the code more similar to natural language text. The goal of the study is to understand when novices transit to a different reading order. We will conduct a longitudinal eye tracking study, in which we accompany undergraduate students of a programming course during a semester, tracking their reading order and learning context. Results may indicate how to adapt the code structure to the expertise and expectations of programmers and to facilitate the understanding of program code. We also hope to gain insights into the learning process of understanding programming languages.