Heuristic Evaluation for Novice Programming Systems

Abstract

The past few years has seen a proliferation of novice programming tools. The availability of a large number of systems has made it difficult for many users to choose among them. Even for education researchers, comparing the relative quality of these tools, or judging their respective suitability for a given context, is hard in many instances. For designers of such systems, assessing the respective quality of competing design decisions can be equally difficult.Heuristic evaluation provides a practical method of assessing the quality of alternatives in these situations and of identifying potential problems with existing systems for a given target group or context. Existing sets of heuristics, however, are not specific to the domain of novice programming and thus do not evaluate all aspects of interest to us in this specialised application domain.In this article, we propose a set of heuristics to be used in heuristic evaluations of novice programming systems. These heuristics have the potential to allow a useful assessment of the quality of a given system with lower cost than full formal user studies and greater precision than the use of existing sets of heuristics. The heuristics are described and discussed in detail. We present an evaluation of the effectiveness of the heuristics that suggests that the new set of heuristics provides additional useful information to designers not obtained with existing heuristics sets.

Programmer eXperience: A Systematic Literature Review

“…It is important to mention that the creation of new sets of heuristics should be performed based on a specific methodology that allows a better instrument to be obtained (compared to other sets). Based on the articles reviewed, we notice that two studies exposed the use of a systematic methodology to create the set of heuristics [1] and [93]. Some of the studies discussed above [21] and [97]- [102] are not included in the results presented in section IV since the keywords used in those articles were not included in our search strings.…”

“…We reviewed various articles that evaluate the influence of the PX, UX and usability on software development artifacts, through usability tests and heuristic evaluations. Heuristic evaluation is one of the most widely used methods of usability inspection, due to its speed, low cost and effectiveness [1]. However, in the studies that we found, heuristic evaluation is less frequently used than tests with users.…”

Pengaruh Kemampuan Berbahasa Inggris Terhadap Hasil Belajar Pemrograman Berorientasi Objek Pada Implementasi Kurikulum Oracle Academy

“…Greenfoot adalah sebuah perangkat lunak interaktif yang digunakan untuk belajar konsep PBO melalui pembuatan game [9]. Greenfoot menggunakan bahasa pemrograman Java yang dibantu dengan berbagai class dan method yang siap untuk digunakan [10]. Berbeda dengan Alice, pengguna harus benar-benar melakukan menulis kode program dengan bahasa pemrograman Java.…”

Evaluating the Effectiveness Roles of Variables in the Novice Programmers Learning

“…These results suggest that the roles present the novice programmers with a conceptual framework that assists them to comprehend programs and construct them better. The learning can be divided into ''deep'' and ''surface'' (Ko¨lling & McKay, 2016). Deep learners tend to understand a topic, while surface learners will concentrate on memorizing.…”