Conceptual Checks for Programming Teachers

Learning to program and learning a new programming language is difficult because it requires learners to undergo conceptual change. Research on conceptual change has shown that instructors' awareness of their students' misconceptions can significantly affect learning outcomes. In this demo we present "conceptual checks", a webbased tool that allows instructors and teaching assistants of programming courses to quickly get an overview of the misconceptions that might come up at a given point in their course. Based on the idea of refutation texts, it asks users to assess the correctness of statements about programming language concepts. We implemented conceptual checks on top of progmiscon.org, an educational repository of programming language misconceptions observed in students learning to program. The inventory currently catalogues more than 200 misconceptions. This demonstration illustrates conceptual checks as an efficient and effective means for instructors to access the relevant information in the large body of misconceptions.