BlueFix: Using Crowd-Sourced Feedback to Support Programming Students in Error Diagnosis and Repair

Feedback is regarded as one of the most important influences on student learning and motivation. But standard compiler feedback is designed for experts not novice programming students, who can find it difficult to interpret and understand. In this paper we present BlueFix, an online tool currently integrated into the BlueJ IDE which is designed to assist programming students with error diagnosis and repair. Unlike existing approaches, BlueFix proposes a feedback algorithm based upon frameworks combined from the HCI and Pedagogical domains, which can provide different students with dynamic levels of support based upon their compilation behaviour. An evaluation revealed that students‟ viewed our tool positively and that our methodology could identify appropriate fixes for uncompilable source code with a significantly higher rate of speed and precision over related techniques in the literature.