Methods and tools for exploring novice compilation behaviour

Our research explores what we call compilation behaviour: the programming behaviour a student engages in while repeatedly editing and compiling their programs. This edit-compile cycle often represents students' attempts to make their programs syntactically, as opposed to semantically, correct. Over the course of two years, we have observed first-year university students learning to program in Java, collecting and studying thousands of snapshots of their programs from one compilation to the next. At the University of Kent, students are introduced to programming in an objects-first style using BlueJ, an environment intended for use by novice programmers.