SPLICE Working Group: Replicating Programming Interventions

Leader: Thomas Price

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 starting a working group taking the first steps towards this vision, with the goal of making it as straightforward as possible to replicate and scale interventions that occur during programming practice (e.g., feedback, metacognitive scaffolding, resource recommendations, enhanced compiler error messages).

Join our Google Group:

If you teach programming and want to incorporate more evidence-supported practices into your classroom, with less overhead.
If you research how to improve outcomes during programming practice and want to replicate your work in more classrooms and collect broader datasets.
If you develop a programming practice environment and want to make it more useful for you users

Let's improve the science of computing education by enabling more easy 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 5 classrooms, using 4 different programming platforms (both professional and academic), and 4 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.