All syntax errors are not equal

Abstract

Identifying and correcting syntax errors is a challenge all novice programmers confront. As educators, the more we understand about the nature of these errors and how students respond to them, the more effective our teaching can be. It is well known that just a few types of errors are far more frequently encountered by students learning to program than most. In this paper, we examine how long students spend resolving the most common syntax errors, and discover that certain types of errors are not solved any more quickly by the higher ability students. Moreover, we note that these errors consume a large amount of student time, suggesting that targeted teaching interventions may yield a significant payoff in terms of increasing student productivity.

Finding and correcting syntax errors using recurrent neural networks

“…The long history of work on syntax error messages is often motivated by the need to better serve novice programmers (Tabanao et al, 2008;Jadud, 2005;Tabanao et al, 2011;Jadud, 2006;Jackson et al, 2005;Garner et al, 2005;McIver, 2000;Kummerfeld and Kay, 2003;Hristova et al, 2003). More recently, Denny et al (Denny et al, 2012) categorized common syntax errors that novices make by the error messages the compiler generates and how long it takes for the programmer to fix them.…”

A Hopfield Neural Network Based Building Agent for Detection and Correction of Programming Errors

“…While the test stage to detection and correction using the matrix token that results from processing algorithm (1). The contribution here is using the number of iteration in Hopfield algorithm (2) to reorder parts of the token.…”

“…One of the important program languages and widespread is Java program where the compiler's error message can be Syntax Errors, Semantic Errors and Logic Errors [1]. This research focuseson syntax errors, to highlight the most common mistakes faced by the beginner [2], some of them are listed below.…”

What's Wrong With My Code (WWWMC)

“…However, the openended nature of programming assignments can lead to (1) misguided automatic feedback, (2) a disconnection between an errant student solution and proper advice, (3) a complete lack of advice due to the student not understanding the presented question, or (4) knowledge gaps due to students never encountering a problem/feedback pairing. What's Wrong With My Code (WWWMC) attempts to emulate the apprenticeship environment and solve these problems by using a much more stringent and guided experience while still maintaining scalability.…”

“…Once misconceptions are known, incorporating pedagogy into courses is an active pursuit of not only computer science education [4][5] [9][11] [12] but other educational fields [3] [13] as well. Pair debugging [12] by Murphy et al shows how to incorporate debugging into the commonly utilized pedagogical technique of pair programming.…”