Combating Misconceptions by Encouraging Example-Writing

Posted on 11 January 2020.

Here’s a summary of the full arc, including later work, of the Examplar project.

When faced with an unfamiliar programming problem, undergraduate computer science students all-too-often begin their implementations with an incomplete understanding of what the problem is asking, and may not realize until far into their development process (if at all) that they have solved the wrong problem. At best, a student realizes their mistake, suffers from some frustration, and is able to correct it before the final submission deadline. At worst, they might not realize their mistake until they receive feedback on their final submission—depriving them of the intended learning goal of the assignment.

Educators must therefore provide students with some mechanism by which students can evaluate their own understanding of a problem—before they waste time implementing some misconceived variation of that problem. To this end, we provide students with Examplar: an IDE for writing input–output examples that provides on-demand feedback on whether the examples are:

  1. valid (consistent with the problem), and
  2. thorough (explore the conceptually interesting corners of the problem).

For a demonstration, watch this brief video!

With its gamification, we believed students would find Examplar compelling to use. Moreover, we believed its feedback would be helpful. Both of these hypotheses were confirmed. We found that students used Examplar extensively—even when they were not required to use it, and even for assignments for which they were not required to submit test cases. The quality of students’ final submissions generally improved over previous years, too. For more information, read the full paper here!