Sympathy for the (Novice) Developer
Ioannis Karvelas, Brett A. Becker · Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education · 2022
In this work we investigate compilation behavior and error resolution time of thousands of novice programmers using two different versions of the BlueJ pedagogical Java programming environment. The two versions feature different compilation and error message presentation mechanisms. BlueJ 3 is a click-to-compile environment with enforced first error message presentation whereas BlueJ 4 features automatic compilation and on-demand error message presentation. We provide an overview of compilation activity based on novices' programming time spent in different compilation states and also present differences in the time it takes students to reach successful compilation states in each version. We find that compilation activity differs for each version and that students reach successful compilations faster in BlueJ 4. Based on our findings, we discuss the effectiveness of each version and argue against the constant red underlining of code - an error indicator mechanism present in BlueJ 4 - as this can lead to false positive errors that may mislead novices during their programming tasks.