Summer Student Project Adam Dodd Use of social networking sites for novice programmers

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