Current Trends in Online Programming Languages Learning Tools: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Students face difficulties in programming languages learning (PLL) which encourages many scholars to investigate the factors behind that. Although there a number of positive and negative factors found to be effective in PLL procedure, utilising online tools in PLL were recognized as a positive recommended means. This motivates many researchers to provide solutions and proposals which result in a number of choices and options. However, categorising those efforts and showing what has been done, would provide a better and clear image for future studies. Therefore, this paper aims to conduct a systematic literature review to show what studies have been done and then categorise them based on the type of online tools and the aims of the research. The study follows Kitchenham and Charters guidelines for writing SLR (Systematic Literature Review). The search result reached 1390 publications between 2013-09/2018. After the filtration which has been done through selected criteria, 160 publications were found to be adequate to answer the review questions. The main results of this systematic review are categorizing the aims of the studies in online PLL tools, classifying the tools and finding the current trends of the online PLL tools.