Observation of students while solving programming exercises in CodingBat 

Students of the Department of Applied Computer Science were considered potential test subjects, if they had successfully participated and completed at least the course "Programming 1" (basic programming course) at Fulda University of Applied Sciences at the time of the tests. This is also the reason for the test series to take place after the exam period of the winter semester 2016/2017. The introductory programming course teaches the basics of Java programming, including recursion. There were no other special preferences of study participants with regard to a course of study or a specific semester number, since all students at the Department of Applied Computer Science attended one and the same course for the introduction to programming in the winter semester 2016/2017. In this respect, it can be assumed that there is at least a common basis of knowledge that was presented to students in the course. Hence, all students were considered as potential test subjects who had at least passed the first programming course accredited with 5 ECTS points and 4 contact hours per semester (German: “Semesterwochenstunden”) as a common basis.

The data package consists of:

• 11 transcripts of screen activities of a total of 11 student (A01 to A06 and B01 to B05) while solving the CodingBat task of computing the factorial of natural numbers n,
• 5 transcripts of screen activities of the same students (B01 to B05) while solving the CodingBat task of computing the Fibonacci sequence
• a total of 16 transcripts from 11 students are available