A Preliminary Data-driven Analysis of Common Errors Encountered by Novice SPARC Programmers

Answer Set Programming (ASP), a modern development of Logic Programming, enables natural integration Computing with STEM subjects. This addresses widely acknowledged challenge in K-12 education, and early empirical results on ASP-based are promising. Although ASP is considered simple language when compared imperative programming languages, errors can still be significant barrier for students. particularly true students who novice users ASP. Categorizing measuring their difficulty has yielded insights into languages like Java. However, little known about the types encountered by using To address this, we collected high school student programs submitted during 4-session seminar teaching an as SPARC. From error messages this dataset, identify collection classes, measure how frequently each class occurs difficult it to resolve.