Speaker: Neil Brown (King’s College London)
November 19, 2024, Tuesday. 4PM. Room TG23.
Title: How novices program in Java
Abstract: In order to improve the teaching of programming, it is important to understand how novices program. Our research group makes an IDE for novice Java programmers called BlueJ. Ten years ago we initiated a project named Blackbox which records the source code edits made by opted-in BlueJ users. This has provided us with terabytes of observations of novices programming in Java. In this talk I will summarise some of the results we have obtained by analysing the Blackbox data, looking at the errors novices make, what educators think about it, and how novices construct their Java programs. Come and find out how long it takes students to master syntax, whether educators can accurately predict student mistakes, and whether novices ever write comments.
Biography: Neil works as a Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London. He has worked in computing education research for fifteen years. His role is literally research and development: researching how novices learn to program, and developing IDEs and program editors that support novices in learning programming. Each side informs the other, with research results informing tool design, and tool design inspiring new research questions.