Supporting the Acquisition of Programming Skills with Program Construction Patterns

Abstract

A central topic to computer science education is the training of novice programmers. Novice programming skills have already been mapped to hierarchical levels, and expert programming skills have been measured based on task performance. But didactical instructions and individual support to acquire expert programming skills have not been provided in detail. I propose the investigation of structural and semantic patterns in program construction sequences in an IDE-based learning analytics setting. I aim to provide a more fine-grained assessment of programming skills, to enable skill assessments during programming tasks, and to support the individual acquisition of programming skills.