Comprehension analysis considering programming thinking ability using code puzzle

In programming education, the instructor tries to find out the learners who needs help by grasping the learners’ development of understanding using tests that require knowledge. However, in reality, not many learners will acquire the skill of writing source codes. This kind of current situation implies that programming ability of learners cannot be measured by tests that require knowledge. This paper focuses on not only the knowledge items required for programming but also the programming thinking (computational thinking), which is the ability to combine the constituent elements of the program. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the learner’s understanding from the learner’s process to solve the code puzzles that require programming thinking as well as knowledge. We developed the interface to realize the proposed method. The experimental result with the interface showed that the proposed method could estimate with the accuracy of 80% or more.