ProgSnap2: A Flexible Format for Programming Process Data

In this paper, we introduce ProgSnap2, a standardized format for logging programming process data. ProgSnap2 is a tool for computing education researchers, with the goal of enabling collaboration by helping them to collect and share data, analysis code, and data-driven tools to support students. We give an overview of the format, including how events, event attributes, metadata, code snapshots and external resources are represented. We also present a case study to evaluate how ProgSnap2 can facilitate collaborative research. We investigated three metrics designed to quantify students' difficulty with compiler errors - the Error Quotient, Repeated Error Density and Watwin score - and compared their distributions and ability to predict students' performance. We analyzed five different ProgSnap2 datasets, spanning a variety of contexts and programming languages. We found that each error metric is mildly predictive of students' performance. We reflect on how the common data format allowed us to more easily investigate our research questions.