Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Heuristic Evaluation for Novice Programming Systems

Heuristic Evaluation for Novice Programming Systems Heuristic Evaluation for Novice Programming Systems ¨ MICHAEL KOLLING and FRASER MCKAY, University of Kent The past few years has seen a proliferation of novice programming tools. The availability of a large number of systems has made it difficult for many users to choose among them. Even for education researchers, comparing the relative quality of these tools, or judging their respective suitability for a given context, is hard in many instances. For designers of such systems, assessing the respective quality of competing design decisions can be equally difficult. Heuristic evaluation provides a practical method of assessing the quality of alternatives in these situations and of identifying potential problems with existing systems for a given target group or context. Existing sets of heuristics, however, are not specific to the domain of novice programming and thus do not evaluate all aspects of interest to us in this specialised application domain. In this article, we propose a set of heuristics to be used in heuristic evaluations of novice programming systems. These heuristics have the potential to allow a useful assessment of the quality of a given system with lower cost than full formal user studies and greater precision than the use http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE) Association for Computing Machinery

Heuristic Evaluation for Novice Programming Systems

Loading next page...
 
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/heuristic-evaluation-for-novice-programming-systems-t0kHErPc7G

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
1946-6226
DOI
10.1145/2872521
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Heuristic Evaluation for Novice Programming Systems ¨ MICHAEL KOLLING and FRASER MCKAY, University of Kent The past few years has seen a proliferation of novice programming tools. The availability of a large number of systems has made it difficult for many users to choose among them. Even for education researchers, comparing the relative quality of these tools, or judging their respective suitability for a given context, is hard in many instances. For designers of such systems, assessing the respective quality of competing design decisions can be equally difficult. Heuristic evaluation provides a practical method of assessing the quality of alternatives in these situations and of identifying potential problems with existing systems for a given target group or context. Existing sets of heuristics, however, are not specific to the domain of novice programming and thus do not evaluate all aspects of interest to us in this specialised application domain. In this article, we propose a set of heuristics to be used in heuristic evaluations of novice programming systems. These heuristics have the potential to allow a useful assessment of the quality of a given system with lower cost than full formal user studies and greater precision than the use

Journal

ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Jun 8, 2016

There are no references for this article.