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Block-based programming languages like Scratch are increasingly popular for programming education and end-user programming. Recent program analyses build on the insight that source code can be modelled using techniques from natural language…

Timely, personalized feedback is essential for students learning programming. LLM-powered tools like ChatGPT offer instant support, but reveal direct answers with code, which may hinder deep conceptual engagement. We developed CodeAid, an…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is being increasingly used to learn and adapt application behavior in many domains, including large-scale and safety critical systems, as for example, autonomous driving. With the advent of plug-n-play RL…

Programming is a fundamentally interactive process, yet coding assistants are often evaluated using static benchmarks that fail to measure how well models collaborate with users. We introduce an interactive evaluation pipeline to examine…

The importance of programming education has lead to dedicated educational programming environments, where users visually arrange block-based programming constructs that typically control graphical, interactive game-like programs. The…

As programmers write code, they often edit and retry multiple times, creating rich "interaction traces" that reveal how they approach coding tasks and provide clues about their level of skill development. For novice programmers in…

When learning to program, students are usually assessed based on the code they wrote. However, the mere completion of a programming task does not guarantee actual comprehension of the underlying concepts. Asking learners questions about the…

JavaScript has been consistently among the most popular programming languages in the past decade. However, its dynamic, weakly-typed, and asynchronous nature can make it challenging to write maintainable code for developers without in-depth…

Bugs in learners' programs are often the result of fundamental misconceptions. Teachers frequently face the challenge of first having to understand such bugs, and then suggest ways to fix them. In order to enable teachers to do so…

Refactoring is the practice of improving software quality without altering its external behavior. Developers intuitively refactor their code for multiple purposes, such as improving program comprehension, reducing code complexity, dealing…

Machine learning (ML) has rapidly grown in popularity, becoming vital to many industries. Currently, the research on code smells in ML applications lacks tools and studies that address the identification and validity of ML-specific code…

Unit testing is an essential component of the software development life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their importance,…

While a substantial body of prior research has investigated the form and nature of production code, comparatively little attention has examined characteristics of test code, and, in particular, test smells in that code. In this paper, we…

Providing feedback on programming assignments manually is a tedious, error prone, and time-consuming task. In this paper, we motivate and address the problem of generating feedback on performance aspects in introductory programming…

Code smells are indicators of potential design flaws in source code and do not appear alone but in combination with other smells, creating complex interactions. While existing literature classifies these smell interactions into collocated,…

Elixir is a new functional programming language whose popularity is rising in the industry. However, there are few works in the literature focused on studying the internal quality of systems implemented in this language. Particularly, to…

Bad smells have been defined to describe potential problems in code, possibly pointing out refactoring opportunities. Several empirical studies have highlighted that smells have a negative impact on comprehension and maintainability.…

Good code style improves program readability, maintainability, and collaboration, and is an integral component of software quality. Developers, however, often cut corners when following style rules, leading to the wide adoption of tools…

In this paper, we present a tertiary systematic literature review of previous surveys, secondary systematic literature reviews, and systematic mappings. We identify the main observations (what we know) and challenges (what we do not know)…

Teachers face several challenges when presenting the fundamental concepts of programming in the classroom. Several tools are introduced to give a visual dimension to support the learning process. These tools rely on code blocks, easily…