Exploring programming misconceptions: an analysis of student mistakes in visual program simulation exercises

Visual program simulation (VPS) is a form of interactive program visualization in which novice programmers practice tracing computer programs: using a graphical interface, they are expected to correctly indicate each consecutive stage in the execution of a given program. Naturally, students make mistakes during VPS; in this article, we report a study of such mistakes. Visual program simulation tries to get students to act on their conceptions; a VPS-supporting software system may be built so that it reacts to student behaviors and provides feedback tailored to address suspected misconceptions. To focus our efforts in developing the feedback given by our VPS system, UUhistle, we wished to identify the most common mistakes that students make and to explore the reasons behind them. We analyzed the mistakes in over 24,000 student-submitted solutions to VPS assignments collected over three years. 26 mistakes stood out as relatively common and therefore worthy of particular attention. Some of the mistakes appear to be related to usability issues and others to known misconceptions about programming concepts; others still suggest previously unreported conceptual difficulties. Beyond helping us develop our visualization tool, our study lends tentative support to the claim that many VPS mistakes are linked to programming misconceptions and VPS logs can be a useful data source for studying students' understandings of CS1 content.

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