CodeProcess Charts: Visualizing the Process of Writing Code

Instructors of computer programming courses evaluate student progress on code submissions, exams, and other activities. The evaluation of code submissions is typically a summative assessment that gives very little insight into the process the student used when designing and writing the code. Thus, a tool that offers instructors a view into how students actually write their code could have broad impacts on assessment, intervention, instructional design, and plagiarism detection. In this article we propose an interactive software tool with a novel visualization that includes both static and dynamic views of the process that students take to complete computer programming assignments. We report results of an exploratory think-aloud study in which instructors offer thoughts as to the utility and potential of the tool. In the think-aloud study, we observed that the instructors easily identified multiple coding strategies (or the lack of thereof), were able to recognize plagiarism, and noticed a clear need for wider dissemination of tools for visualizing the programming process.