PL-detective

Abstract

Last year we described the PL-Detective, a system for building exercises and demonstrations in a programming languages course. One of the main goals of the PL-Detective was to provide an experimental environment with which students could interact in order to discover the information that they needed to complete the exercise. In this paper we evaluate the PL-Detective with respect to this goal. We present data from a class of 29 groups of two or three students that used the PL-Detective for 11 exercises. Our data shows that students are both effective and efficient at getting information from the PL-Detective.

The PL-detective revisited

“…Of the 380 student answers, 275 (72%) had conclusive evidence, and 254 (67%) passed the exercise, close to the 70% reported by Diwan et al [2005]. Figure 2 breaks down these numbers by exercise.…”

“…There is now a variety of techniques to support online student learning [Diwan et al 2005;Feldman et al 2019;Wrigstad and Castegren 2017] in the form of "blended learning" [Stacey and Gerbic 2008] that combines online activities with inperson meetings. Our work re-validates one of these techniques and sheds more light on the approach's strengths and weaknesses.…”