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Autonomous Recovery from Programming Errors Made by Primary School Children

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Book cover Informatics in Schools. Fundamentals of Computer Science and Software Engineering (ISSEP 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11169))

Abstract

Programming classes offer unique opportunities to learn both semantic and syntactic precision, even for primary school children without prior knowledge in computer science. In order to make students progress autonomously, programming languages and environments need to be chosen with care to their didactic quality. This paper introduces four classes covering the majority of what we call structural programming errors. These mistakes are either syntactical errors or the result of invocations that do not match the signature of any user-defined command, and therefore prevent the execution of a program. Furthermore, we present a methodology that allows for detecting as many structural programming errors as possible, and show how we integrated this methodology in our Logo programming environment for primary schools. Finally, we reflect on an evaluation we carried out at school that confirms the didactic benefits of the chosen approach.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich, Universitätstrasse 6, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Martina Forster, Urs Hauser, Giovanni Serafini & Jacqueline Staub

  2. Pädagogische Hochschule Graubünden, Scalärastrasse 17, 7000, Chur, Switzerland

    Jacqueline Staub

Authors
  1. Martina Forster
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  2. Urs Hauser
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  3. Giovanni Serafini
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  4. Jacqueline Staub
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jacqueline Staub .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Sergei N. Pozdniakov

  2. Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Valentina Dagienė

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 2.

Table 2. Actual exercises solved in our study. Errors are marked red (note: this information was not provided to the pupils). While our control group was solving the exercise blindly, our diagnosis tool provided the experimental group with detailed information and hints.
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Forster, M., Hauser, U., Serafini, G., Staub, J. (2018). Autonomous Recovery from Programming Errors Made by Primary School Children. In: Pozdniakov, S., Dagienė, V. (eds) Informatics in Schools. Fundamentals of Computer Science and Software Engineering. ISSEP 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11169. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02750-6_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02750-6_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02749-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02750-6

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