research-article

115 Ways Not to Say Hello, World!: Syntax Errors Observed in a Large-Scale Online CS0 Python Course

Authors:

Bryn Jeffries,

Jung A. Lee,

Irena KoprinskaAuthors Info & Claims

ITiCSE '22: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 1

Pages 337 - 343

https://doi.org/10.1145/3502718.3524809

Published: 07 July 2022 Publication History

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Abstract

Online programming courses can provide detailed automatic feedback for code that fails to meet various test conditions, but novice students often struggle with syntax errors and are unable to write valid testable code. Even for very simple exercises, the range of incorrect code can be surprising to educators with mastery of a programming language. This research paper presents an analysis of the error messages from code run by students in an introductory Python~3 programming course, participated in by 8680 primary and high-school students from 680 institutions. The invalid programs demonstrate a wide diversity of mistakes: even for a one-line "Hello World!'' exercise there were 115 unique invalid programs. The most common errors are identified and compared to the topics introduced in the course. The most generic errors in selected exercises are investigated in greater detail to understand the underlying causes. While the majority of students attempting an exercise reach a successful outcome, many students encounter at least one error in their code. Of these, many such errors indicate basic mistakes, such as unquoted string literals, even in exercises late in the course for which some proficiency of earlier concepts is assumed. These observations suggest there is significant scope to provide greater reinforcement of students' understanding of earlier concepts.

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Cited By

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Yang ZHu M(2023)Improvement and Evaluation of a Block-based Language Environment for Introductory C# Programming Course2023 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE)10.1109/TALE56641.2023.10398306(1-6)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE56641.2023.10398306

Index Terms

115 Ways Not to Say Hello, World!: Syntax Errors Observed in a Large-Scale Online CS0 Python Course
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. K-12 education

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ITiCSE '22: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 1

July 2022

686 pages

ISBN:9781450392013

DOI:10.1145/3502718

General Chairs:
Brett A. Becker
University College Dublin, Ireland
,
Keith Quille
Technological University Dublin, Ireland
,
Mikko-Jussi Laakso
University of Turku, Finland
,
Program Chairs:
Erik Barendsen
Radboud University & Open University, The Netherlands
,
Simon
Unaffiliated, Australia

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 07 July 2022

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ITiCSE 2022

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SIGCSE

ITiCSE 2022: Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

July 8 - 13, 2022

Dublin, Ireland

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Yang ZHu M(2023)Improvement and Evaluation of a Block-based Language Environment for Introductory C# Programming Course2023 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE)10.1109/TALE56641.2023.10398306(1-6)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE56641.2023.10398306

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Engaging Programming Assignments to Recruit and Retain CS0 Students: (Abstract Only)

Overview of the cyberTech-ITEST project: an initiative to attract and prepare under-represented students for tomorrow's careers in the computing sciences

Overview of the cyberTech-ITEST project: an initiative to attract and prepare under-represented students for tomorrow's careers in the computing sciences