Building an open, large-scale research data repository of initial programming student behaviour
Michael Kölling, Ian Utting · 2012
Many initiatives in improving learning of programming are based on gut instinct or localised experience. Gathering data as a basis for interventions, especially on a large scale, is hard. The BlueJ environment is being instrumented to collect data useful to a variety of educational programming researchers. BlueJ is ideally placed to collect such data: Users number in the millions, situated all over the world. This volume and diversity is unique in the history of such investigations and presents a significant opportunity for researchers. The data will be open to interested research groups, which will enable a wide variety of investigations that were previously impractical. This session presents work to date and solicits input from researchers about the design of the data collection.