Designing and Refining of Questions to Assess Students' Ability to Mentally Simulate Programs and Predict Program Behavior (Abstract Only)

Mental simulation is an important skill for program understanding and prediction of program behavior. Assessing students' ability to mentally simulate program execution can be challenging in graphical programming environments and on paper-based assessments. This poster presents the iterative design and refinement process for assessing students' ability to mentally simulate and predict code behavior using a novel introductory computational thinking curriculum for Microsoft's Kodu Game Lab. We present an analysis of question prompts and student responses from data collected from three rising 3rd - 6th graders where the curriculum was implemented. Analysis of student responses suggest that this type of question can be used to identify misconceptions and misinterpretation of instructions. Finally, we present recommendations for question prompt design to foster better student simulation of program execution.