Automatic Assessment and Visualization of Programming Skill for Learners and Educators
PhD open call 2022
IT literacy is an essential skill in our times and, given the dynamism of the IT domain, programming-related learning is likely to become a life-long activity for many. Since there are disproportionately more students of programming than teachers, a great challenge in education will be the ability to assess and meet each student at their skill level and to provide suitable exercises, content, and feedback.
This Ph.D. project aims to develop novel technologies that will help people understand their own, their peers, and their students’ programming skills and weaknesses. The project will develop tools for the continuous assessment of skill level. This will be achieved by monitoring and analyzing the source code committed by learners to version control systems, a technique from the field of mining software repositories. Visualization tools strived at helping users understand and monitor skills will be designed based on the scholarship of teaching and learning as well as the techniques that have emerged from information visualization (InfoVis) and the related field of software visualization.
The resulting tools and techniques will foster scaffolded self-evaluation and problem-solving skills for all students of programming, with the aim of increasing the effectiveness of IT education for students and educators worldwide.
Start date: Upon agreement
Proposed supervisors: Mircea Lungu, Nanna Inie, Søren Knudsen
Contact: Mircea Lungu, mlu@itu.dk
Research Group: Software Engineering
If successful, the position is fully financed by ITU.