Supporting Novices and Advanced Students in Acquiring Multiple Coding Skills

Abstract

We present our study on PyKinetic with various activities to target several skills: code tracing, debugging, and code writing. Half of the participants (control group) received the problems in a fixed order, while for the other half (experimental group) problems were selected adaptively, based on their performance. In a previous paper, we discussed the general findings from the study. In this paper we present further analyses and focus on differences between low performing students and students with higher pre-existing knowledge. We hypothesized that: (H1) novices will benefit more than advanced students, and (H2) advanced students in the experimental group will benefit more than those in the control group. The results confirmed H1 and revealed that this version of PyKinetic was more beneficial for novice learners. Moreover, novices showed evidence of learning multiple skills: code writing, debugging and code tracing. However, we did not have enough evidence for hypothesis H2.