Foobaz: Variable Name Feedback for Student Code at Scale
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Miller_Foobaz.pdf
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555.33 KB
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Author(s)
Glassman, Elena L
Fischer, Lyla J
Scott, Jeremy Kenneth
Miller, Robert C
Date Issued
November 2015
Journal
Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology - UIST '15
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Glassman, Elena L., Lyla Fischer, Jeremy Scott, and Robert C. Miller. “Foobaz.” Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology - UIST ’15 (2015), New York, NY, USA, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2015.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Current traditional feedback methods, such as hand-grading student code for substance and style, are labor intensive and do not scale. We created a user interface that addresses feedback at scale for a particular and important aspect of code quality: variable names. We built this user interface on top of an existing back-end that distinguishes variables by their behavior in the program. Therefore our interface not only allows teachers to comment on poor variable names, they can comment on names that mislead the reader about the variable's role in the program. We ran two user studies in which 10 teachers and 6 students created and received feedback, respectively. The interface helped teachers give personalized variable name feedback on thousands of student solutions from an edX introductory programming MOOC. In the second study, students composed solutions to the same programming assignments and immediately received personalized quizzes composed by teachers in the previous user study.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2807442.2807495
