Analyzing the Impact of Programming Mistakes on Students' Programming Abilities

Resumo

Even with all the research that studies mistakes made by students in introductory programming courses, there is still a lot to understand about how such mistakes are made and corrected. The reviewed works investigate the code as a final, static artifact, but this does not tell the whole story about the students' mistakes. This study is intended to be the foundation of an approach that attempts to close this gap by capturing the whole progress of the coding process. By analyzing the data collected in an experiment, we found the most common issues in the students' code. This enabled us to know which mistakes may prevent them from reaching a correct solution, and which will not interfere but may show an understanding problem in the core programming concepts.