Towards crowdsourced large-scale feedback for novice programmers

Abstract

I propose a crowdsourced large-scale feedback system for novice programmers powered by experienced programmers, or code reviewers (who I will refer to as “reviewers”). Reviewers have two jobs: making suggestions to improve novice programs and authoring rules that generalize when a program should receive their suggestion. A rule is a heuristic program that can be run on a novice program to determine whether the system should present the suggestion to the novice programmer. For example, imagine a novice program that contains a certain method call repeated three times in a row. A reviewer might suggest to improve the program by replacing the three identical method calls with a loop. The reviewer would then author a rule that checks whether code in other novice programs also contains repeated lines of code. If the rule determines that a novice program does have repeated code, the system would present the suggestion to the novice programmer to use a loop by showing an example of correct loop usage.