Getting Started with Source Code Analysis for Programming Education Research

Interesting ideas for computing education research often involve analysis of source code written by beginners. The process is often difficult to carry out: data must be collected from learners and then the code must be analysed. This can be daunting and time-intensive. In this workshop we will show how to get started with syntactic source analysis using a pre-provided data set and an easier analysis technique. The dataset is Blackbox Mini; the Blackbox project has been collecting data from Java novices for the last eight years and a subset of the data, named Blackbox Mini, has been extracted into a SrcML data format. SrcML is an XML-based format for storing program code so that the syntax tree can be navigated using existing powerful XML libraries. This makes source code analysis easier and more accessible to a wider audience. Attendees at the workshop will learn how to use SrcML to work with the Blackbox Mini data set, including basic statistics gathering, and basic syntactic source code analysis. As a result, attendees will be able to design and execute their own source-based research studies. Attendees should bring their own device with an SSH client installed.