Solution Spaces

Kasto, N., Whalley, J., Philpott, A. and Whalley, D.

This paper explores the idea of solution space in the context of novice programmers and code writing tasks. A definition for solution space is provided and an analysis of a series of code writing questions from a first year Java programming course's practical programming tests is provided to measure the impact of solution space size on the difficulty of a code writing question. We found that as the solution space size increases so does the difficulty of the question and that despite relatively high solutions spaces we see a very limited set of these solutions as student responses. Finally we conclude with some conjectures about the possible causes for the trends that we have observed.

Cite as: Kasto, N., Whalley, J., Philpott, A. and Whalley, D. (2014). Solution Spaces. In Proc. Sixteenth Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2014) Auckland, New Zealand. CRPIT, 148. Whalley, J. and D\'Souza, D. Eds., ACS. 133-137

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