Paper Info
Title
Hedy: A Gradual Language for Programming Education
Abstract
One of the aspects of programming that learners often struggle with is the syntax of programming languages: remembering the right commands to use and combining those into a working program. Prior research demonstrated that students submit source code with syntax errors in 73% of cases and even the best students do so in 50% of cases. An analysis of 37 million compilations by 250.000 students found that the most common error was a syntax error, which occurred in almost 800.000 compilations. It was also found that Java and Perl are not easier to understand than a programming language with randomly generated keywords, stressing the difficulties that novices face in understanding syntax. This paper presents Hedy: a new way of teaching the syntax of a programming language to novices, inspired by educational methods by which punctuation is taught to children. Hedy starts as a simple programming language without any syntactic elements such as brackets, colons or indentation. The rules slowly and gradually change until the novices are programming in Python. Hedy is evaluated on 9714 programs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3372782.3406262
ICER '20: International Computing Education Research Conference Virtual Event New Zealand August, 2020
DocType
ISBN
Citations 
Conference
978-1-4503-7092-9
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Felienne Hermans166.49