Quantifying Student Struggles using Heatmaps and Keystroke Data

Abstract

Understanding and measuring the work a student has put into a homework assignment is a metric that is not easy to calculate. This is because the output of a student’s work is not necessarily the sum of their efforts as lots of effort is lost along the way when coding. In this paper we attempt to demonstrate the effort a student puts into their homework through the creation of a novel algorithm based around keystroke data. With this algorithm we pass the results from the algorithm to a heat map generator to help show where a student is spending most of their time working on their code.