ScratchLog+: Live Analytics of Learners’ Exercise Progress

Abstract

While the block-based programming language Scratch is a popular introductory programming environment, gathering information about student progress is challenging since the environment does not expose any kind of analytics. The ScratchLog tool already alleviates this somewhat, but focusses mainly on classroom management and general analytics suited for open-ended tasks. To also provide insights about student progress in goal-oriented exercises, we propose the ScratchLog+ extension in this paper. Our tool combines Whisker test suites to collect information about the functional correctness of students’ programs, and code embedding models to estimate structural and semantic progress towards an example solution. To make these new analytics of ScratchLog+ accessible to teachers, they are directly integrated into the ScratchLog user interface as interpretable visualisations of the typically abstract code embedding vectors. We provide a screencast demonstrating the tool at https://youtu.be/lQSCDqvbpQY.