Profiling Programming Language Learning

This paper documents a year-long experiment to “profile” the process of learning a programming language: gathering data to understand what makes a language hard to learn, and using that data to improve the learning process. We added interactive quizzes to The Rust Programming Language, the official...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of ACM on programming languages Vol. 8; no. OOPSLA1; pp. 29 - 54
Main Authors: Crichton, Will, Krishnamurthi, Shriram
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 29.04.2024
Subjects:
Applied computing
E-learning
General programming languages
Software and its engineering
rust education
digital textbooks
item response theory
ISSN:2475-1421, 2475-1421
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper documents a year-long experiment to “profile” the process of learning a programming language: gathering data to understand what makes a language hard to learn, and using that data to improve the learning process. We added interactive quizzes to The Rust Programming Language, the official textbook for learning Rust. Over 13 months, 62,526 readers answered questions 1,140,202 times. First, we analyze the trajectories of readers. We find that many readers drop-out of the book early when faced with difficult language concepts like Rust’s ownership types. Second, we use classical test theory and item response theory to analyze the characteristics of quiz questions. We find that better questions are more conceptual in nature, such as asking why a program does not compile vs. whether a program compiles. Third, we performed 12 interventions into the book to help readers with difficult questions. We find that on average, interventions improved quiz scores on the targeted questions by +20%. Fourth, we show that our technique can likely generalize to languages with smaller user bases by simulating our statistical inferences on small N. These results demonstrate that quizzes are a simple and useful technique for understanding language learning at all scales.
ISSN:2475-1421
2475-1421
DOI:10.1145/3649812