Analysis of Student Learning Process Using Thonny Log Files
Name
Sten Vaher
Abstract
The process of studying programming is a process at which the teachers are unable to know how the student acquires their knowledge. The only tool for teachers to assess the student this far is to give the students individual tasks to solve. This only assesses the correctness of the solution but will not give an overview of the process which leads to the solution itself. Thonny is a programming environment that stores the solution process in log files and during the MOOC “Introduction to Programming”, the log files of the final test were collected. It is possible to see the process which lead to each student’s solution from these files and this information could be helpful for the teachers for upcoming semesters. During this study log files of the MOOC’s finals are analysed. The main objective of the study is to describe the process of solving programming problems for students that are starting programming and to compare students that are testing their code continuously against students that are not. The most important feature that is being looked at is whether the students starts with testing at the start of their code writing or not. As it turns out, teaching students to constantly test after every move, might not be the only way to learn programming. It turned out that most errors students did were object and syntax errors. This lead to a possible solution of making each student explain their code to another person that knows more about programming.
Graduation Thesis language
Estonian
Graduation Thesis type
Bachelor - Computer Science
Supervisor(s)
Heidi Meier
Defence year
2020