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Mind the Error Message: An Inverted Quiz Format to Direct Learner's Attention to Error Messages

Published: 30 June 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Novice learners of programming tend to neglect error messages, even though the messages have a lot of useful information for solving problems. While there exists research that aims to user-friendly error messages by changing the wording and by adding visual assistance, most of them do not focus on drawing learners' attention to error messages. We propose the enbugging quiz, a novel quiz format that requests the learner to craft a program that produces a specified error. This paper reports our design of enbugging quizzes and reports the results of our initial experiment, where we observed positive effects on the learners' attitudes towards error messages.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ITiCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1
    June 2023
    694 pages
    ISBN:9798400701382
    DOI:10.1145/3587102
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 30 June 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. language-agnostic exercise
    2. novice programmers
    3. produce errors
    4. programming education

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