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Enhancing Programming Learning through Social Networking: A Study on Learner Interactions

This project explores the use of Facebook groups to facilitate learner-learner interactions among novice programmers. Led by Dr. Daryl D’Souza with team members Dr. Margaret Hamilton, Dr. Falk Scholer, and Ms. Mercy Maleko, the focus is on capturing and analyzing conversations from student cohorts to identify common programming queries and challenges. Our findings reveal significant spikes in activity correlated with assignment deadlines, highlighting key areas where students seek assistance. This analysis aims to inform teaching strategies and enhance the learning experience in programming education.

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Enhancing Programming Learning through Social Networking: A Study on Learner Interactions

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  1. Summer Student ProjectAdam DoddUse of social networking sites for novice programmers Capturing learner-learner interactions to aid constructivism Project Leader: Dr Daryl D’Souza Team Members: Dr Margaret Hamilton, Dr Falk Scholer, Ms Mercy Maleko

  2. Background & Aims • Mercy Maleko (PhD Student) established separate Facebook sites for 4 P1 cohorts of students in 2011 • These sites were aimed at facilitating learner-learner interactions in the context of learning programming • Aim of my project is to capture the conversations for further analysis

  3. Approach • Selected the Facebook group with the largest number of messages • Examined questions being posed by students about code • Generated initial set of results for analysis

  4. Selected Facebook site characteristics A message is either a topic or a reply A user is any person who adds any message to the group

  5. Facebook data retrieval • To retrieve the data from the Facebook groups ended up not being too difficult by itself. • Facebook has a site at graph.facebook.com which once you are logged in gives you access to all data accessible from your account. • To retrieve this information automatically I used URLConnection class and wrote my own parsers to sort out the data into easier to use versions (xml and trectext)

  6. Identifying questions and associated statistics • One question taken from the main group is: “Can anyone tell me WHY this won't work? • for (index = 0; index < 10; index = index + 1){score = console.readInt();while(score > 10 && score < 0){System.out.print("Invalid score. Please enter a number between 0 and 10");score = console.readInt();}contestant[index] = score;}”

  7. Results One of the results that came out of the project is that Significant spikes occur Around the middle of semester, ¾’s of the way through and at the end of semester Week 6 = Assignment 1 due Week 10 = Assignment 2 due Week 12 = Assignment 3 + exam

  8. Results This is also shown to be common throughout the semester with if statements being written twice as often as the next highest ( for loops ) A closer look at the largest week shows a predominance of “if statements” being posted/talked about

  9. Discussion • Now that we can automatically produce statistics about groups we can further analyse what exactly the students are talking about and find problems as they arise • In the future we are hoping to be able to automatically find when students have issues with particular topics to aid in their teaching

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