A study on the students' perspective about the usage of a programming monitoring tool

Across the world, computer science programs often present high failure and dropout rates. The difficulties associated with introductory programming courses have long been pointed as one of the most critical factors for this situation. To mitigate students' struggles, the timely assistance provided by the teachers is crucial. To support the teachers in this task, we have developed CodeInsights, which provides them real-time information about the students' performance while solving programming assignments. While CodeInsights has been tested and positively accepted by the teacher in several experiments previously conducted, the students' opinion on the usage of the system has not been carefully addressed. In this paper, we present some of the main features of CodeInsights and present and discuss the main findings of three field experiments in which CodeInsights was used, with a particular focus on the students' reaction to its use.