Comparing and contrasting different algorithms leads to increased student learning

Patitsas, Elizabeth; Craig, Michelle; Easterbrook, Steve

doi:10.1145/2493394.2493409

Cited by 22 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…To the best of our knowledge, SQLRepair is the first automated repair (APR) tool for SQL queries, and our results provide preliminary evidence that this can be useful in education. Patitsas, et al report that presenting students with multiple solutions side-by-side can improve learning outcomes [27]. In cases where peer instruction is unavailable, our results suggest repair tools may be able to provide alternative solutions for students to visualize.…”

Section: A Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 62%

SQLRepair: Identifying and Repairing Mistakes in Student-Authored SQL Queries

Presler-Marshall

Heckman

Stolee

2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET)

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Computer science educators seek to understand the types of mistakes that students make when learning a new (programming) language so that they can help students avoid those mistakes in the future. While educators know what mistakes students regularly make in languages such as C and Python, students struggle with SQL and regularly make mistakes when working with it. We present an analysis of mistakes that students made when first working with SQL, classify the types of errors introduced, and provide suggestions on how to avoid them going forward. In addition, we present an automated tool, SQLRepair, that is capable of repairing errors introduced by undergraduate programmers when writing SQL queries. Our results show that students find repairs produced by our tool comparable in understandability to queries written by themselves or by other students, suggesting that SQL repair tools may be useful in an educational context. We also provide to the community a benchmark of SQL queries written by the students in our study that we used for evaluation of SQLRepair.

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Section: A Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 62%

SQLRepair: Identifying and Repairing Mistakes in Student-Authored SQL Queries

Presler-Marshall

Heckman

Stolee

2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET)

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“…Lastly, if comparison works by connecting similarities in and beneath text, future studies should attend to the physical arrangement of code. As alignment is important for case comparison in pedagogy [33], styling code to physically align analogical parts may highlight implicit similarities. Experimental interfaces like Bragdon and colleagues' Code Bubbles, suggest that proximity helps comprehension beyond simply reducing navigation [34].…”

Section: Implications For Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Similar Code through Comparative Comprehension

Middleton

Stolee

2022

2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

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Any problem in code may have multiple solutions that differ in details large and small. Because modern software development is characterized by an abundance of searchable and reusable code, effective developers must be able to judge not only the meaning of new algorithms but also the differences between alternatives. Therefore, we use a multi-method study to explore how developers perform comparative comprehensionthe cognitive activity of understanding how algorithms behave relative to each other.To explore how developers compare code, we performed a controlled experiment with 16 developers in a mixed think-aloud and interview format and another 95 developers in a survey format. In this experiment, participants investigated whether a pair of code snippets would demonstrate equivalent behavior when run, controlling for differences in behavior, programming languages, algorithmic structures, and meaningful names. Overall, our results describe how comparison fits into learning, reviewing, and reusing code. Our task observations shed light on how developers move between code similarities at different levels-textual, structural, and schematic-when simultaneously inspecting multiple snippets. In our experiment, developers made more accurate conclusions about behavior given similar languages and structures, with names acting as additional evidence in interaction with other cues, but they also overestimated whether behavior is equivalent in many cases. From this, we identify challenges developers face in comprehending alternatives and we highlight opportunities to better support developers in comparison activities.

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“…Throughout my CS teaching career I've emphasized applications and social context, and taken pride in sharing my teaching materials with others. I have published multiple papers sharing experiences and research on my teaching of introductory programming (CS1) [35,63], digital logic [62,[65][66][67], and algorithms & data structures [64,69].…”

Section: Elizabeth I Am Currently An Assistant Professor Atmentioning

confidence: 99%

Materiality Matters in Computing Education: A Duoethnography of Two Digital Logic Educators

Mayhew

Patitsas

2021

LIMITS Workshop on Computing Within Limits

Self Cite

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Computer science needs to be sustainable, and CS educators have an important role to play in changing the discipline. Recent efforts have emerged to teach CS in ways that apply computing to mitigate climate change, but this alone is insufficient: we must also change what it means to do computing. We use duoethnography to interrogate our practices as CS educators to support the goal of integrating sustainability into CS. Despite being invested in these goals, we each realized that we had been nevertheless reinforcing the cultural norms that underpin the environmental and social damage caused by computing. We found five themes in the qualitative analysis of our reflections: (1) A lack of materiality in CS classes makes it difficult for computer scientists to scrutinize the environmental costs of hardware, (2) The discourse on "greenness" in computing neglects the role of embodied emissions, (3) The lack of context in CS education teaches students to perceive the status quo as "natural", (4) Those who have bought into the dominant ideology of CS can be resistant to innovating CS education, and (5) Materiality helps with teaching computing. We illustrate how changing CS to become more sustainable requires deeper thought than "add sustainability and stir" to the curriculum, and insights toward addressing the root ideology of CS education.

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Comparing and contrasting different algorithms leads to increased student learning

Cited by 22 publications

References 13 publications

SQLRepair: Identifying and Repairing Mistakes in Student-Authored SQL Queries

SQLRepair: Identifying and Repairing Mistakes in Student-Authored SQL Queries

Understanding Similar Code through Comparative Comprehension

Materiality Matters in Computing Education: A Duoethnography of Two Digital Logic Educators

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