Working Group
Vision
What if you could go to SIGCSE, see a great paper about an intervention or tool that improved students’ outcomes during programming practice, and use it in your course the next week? Or run a replication study—measures included—in your course and publish a paper on it? What if there was an app store for computing education that supports the programming environment you already use in your class?
SPLICE is taking the first steps toward this vision, with the goal of making it as straightforward as possible to replicate and scale interventions that occur during programming practice, such as feedback, metacognitive scaffolding, resource recommendations, and enhanced compiler error messages.
Who Should Join?
- Programming instructors who want to incorporate more evidence-supported practices into their classrooms with less overhead.
- Researchers who want to replicate work in more classrooms and collect broader datasets.
- Programming-practice environment developers who want to make their platforms more useful for their users.
Let’s improve the science of computing education by enabling easier replication studies in diverse course contexts to understand what actually makes an intervention work. Let’s improve the impact of our research by getting effective interventions into more classrooms.
Current Progress
We are currently running a pilot study to replicate an intervention across five classrooms, using four different programming platforms—both professional and academic—and four different programming languages—imperative and declarative; textual and block-based. The intervention offers adaptive feedback on students’ programs, all using the same intervention, interface, measures adapted per classroom, and source code. Join the working group to learn more!
Future Work
We envision a network of educators, researchers, and tool developers working together to select promising interventions, replicate them across classrooms and programming contexts, and develop protocols and infrastructure to make that process easier each time.