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Solution spaces

Published: 20 January 2014 Publication History

Abstract

This paper explores the idea of solution space in the context of novice programmers and code writing tasks. A definition for solution space is provided and an analysis of a series of code writing questions from a first year Java programming course's practical programming tests is provided to measure the impact of solution space size on the difficulty of a code writing question. We found that as the solution space size increases so does the difficulty of the question and that despite relatively high solutions spaces we see a very limited set of these solutions as student responses. Finally we conclude with some conjectures about the possible causes for the trends that we have observed.

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Cited By

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  • (2018)Introductory programming: a systematic literature reviewProceedings Companion of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3293881.3295779(55-106)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2018

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
ACE '14: Proceedings of the Sixteenth Australasian Computing Education Conference - Volume 148
January 2014
174 pages
ISBN:9781921770319

Sponsors

  • Datacom: Datacom
  • Australian Comp Soc: Australian Computer Society
  • SERL: Software Engineering Research Lab, Auckland University of Technology
  • Auckland University of Technology
  • ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
  • Univ. of Western Sydney: University of Western Sydney
  • The University of Auckland, New Zealand
  • CORE - Computing Research and Education
  • Colab: Collaboratory of Design & Creative Technologies, Auckland University of Technology
  • RMIT University
  • IITP: Institute of IT Professionals New Zealand
  • SIGCSE: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education

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Australian Computer Society, Inc.

Australia

Publication History

Published: 20 January 2014

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Author Tags

  1. assessment
  2. code writing
  3. novice programmers
  4. task complexity

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  • Research-article

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ACE '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 19 of 40 submissions, 48%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 161 of 359 submissions, 45%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2018)Introductory programming: a systematic literature reviewProceedings Companion of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3293881.3295779(55-106)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2018

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