How novices tackle their first lines of code in an IDE: analysis of programming session traces

While computing educators have put plenty of effort into researching and developing programming environments that make it easier for students to create their first programs, these tools often have only little resemblance with the tools used in the industry. We report on a study, where students with no previous programming experience started to program directly using an industry strength programming environment. The programming environment was augmented with logging capability that recorded every keystroke and event within the system, which provided a view on how the novices tackle their first lines of code. Our results show that while at first, the students struggle with syntax - as is typical with learning a new language - no evidence can be found that suggests that learning to use the programming environment is hard. In a two-week period, the students learned to use the basic features of the programming environment such as specific shortcuts. Although we observed students using copy-paste-programming relatively often, most of the pasted code is from their own previous work. Finally, when considering the compilation errors and error distributions, we hypothesize that the errors are a product of three factors; the exercises, the environment, and the data logging granularity.