PL-detective: experiences and results

Last year we described the PL-Detective, a system for building exercises and demonstrations in a programming languages course. One of the main goals of the PL-Detective was to provide an experimental environment with which students could interact in order to discover the information that they needed to complete the exercise. In this paper we evaluate the PL-Detective with respect to this goal. We present data from a class of 29 groups of two or three students that used the PL-Detective for 11 exercises. Our data shows that students are both effective and efficient at getting information from the PL-Detective. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.m [Programming Languages]: Miscellaneous General Terms Human Factors, Languages Keywords Concepts of programming languages, Education

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SIGCSE
• Authors: Amer Diwan, Michele H. Jackson, William M. Waite, Jacob Dickerson
• Keywords: Education, Languages Keywords Concepts, Programming Languages, Programming Languages Course, SIGCSE 2005