Elice: An online CS education platform to understand how students learn programming

Abstract

We present Elice1, an online CS (computer science) education platform, and Elivate, a system for taking student learning data from Elice and infers their progress through an educational taxonomy tailored for programming education. Elice captures detailed student learning activities, such as the intermediate revisions of code as students make progress toward completing their programming exercises. With those data, Elivate recognizes each student's progression through an education taxonomy which organizes intermediate stages of learning such that the taxonomy can be used to evaluate student progress as well as to design and improve course materials and structure. With more than 240,000 intermediate source codes generated by 1,000 students, we demonstrate the practicality of the Elice and Elivate. We present case studies that confirm that categorizing student actions into the different steps of the taxonomy results in better understanding of the effect of TA's assist and student's performance.