Building Tools, Gathering Data: Precursors for Assessing Students' Programming Process (Abstract Only).

Computer programming is a process. Successful programming involves incrementally building and testing a solution. Students' ability to program is typically determined by an assessment of the end-product of a programming session rather than an examination of the actual process students are engaged in. A prerequisite to assessing a student's programming process is having access to that process. While direct one-on-one observation of students while they code has the potential to yield high-quality data, it does not scale well to large classes. One scalable approach is to automatically capture edit events through IDE instrumentation, and programmatically assess the resulting data. In this poster we report on our work to date in developing and deploying a plug-in for Eclipse's Java Development Tools (JDT), explore the data we have collected to date, compare our results with those reported in previous work, and discuss possible directions for future work in using this data for assessment of students' programming process.