Unexpected Tokens

Becker, Brett A.; Denny, Paul; Pettit, Raymond; Bouchard, Durell; Bouvier, Dennis; Harrington, Brian; Kamil, Amir; McDonald, Chris; Osera, Peter-Michael; Pearce, Janice L.; Prather, James

doi:10.1145/3304221.3325539

Cited by 13 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Syntax and parsing errors are the most common causes of confusion for Xacros, and text-based compiler messages have been shown to be mostly unhelpful to developers [16]. Therefore, we suggest that robot software tool builders focus on an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) extension or improvements to error messages generated by the xacro program.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Xacro Misunderstandings

Albergo¹,

Rathi²,

Ore³

2021

Preprint

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The Xacro XML macro language extends the Universal Robot Description Format (URDF) and is part of a critical toolchain from geometric representations to simulation, visualization, and system execution. However, members of the robotics community, especially newcomers, struggle to troubleshoot and understand the interplay between systems and the Xacro preprocessing pipeline. To better understand how system developers struggle with Xacros, we manually examine 712 Xacro-related questions from the question and answer site answers.ros.org and find Xacro misunderstandings fit into 10 key categories using a systematic, qualitative approach called Open Coding. By examining the 'tags' applied to questions, we further find that Xacro problems manifest in a befuddlingly broad set of contexts. This hinders onboarding and complicates system developers' understanding of representations and tools in the Robot Operating System. We aim to provide an empirical grounding that identifies and prioritizes impediments to users of open robotics systems, so that tool designers, teachers, and robotics practitioners can devise ways of improving robot software tooling and education.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Xacro Misunderstandings

Albergo¹,

Rathi²,

Ore³

2021

Preprint

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“…These results are not obtained with the approach of enhanced error messages [3] that, on some occasions, are notoriously problematic, especially for novices [9]. They are neither obtained with tools for detecting errors and repairing programs that have proved to be not really useful for achieving their purpose [35].…”

Section: Rq 1: Per Message Error Is Feedback Effective?mentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Research has shown that learners perceive the examples as an assistance to them [24,32,36]. Nonetheless, the feedback of the example-based development environment to the student has proven to be pedagogically questionable, as there is no guarantee that the student can relate the generic example to a specific code error or that they have sufficient knowledge to make sense of the example [3]. Furthermore, on a practical level, Prather et al [27] noted that showing code samples to novice learners to correct errors confused them because they spent a substantial amount of time searching for that code sample in their files.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent research have included some improvements regarding feedback given by development environments, thus allowing it to be both formative and immediate [10,20]. Despite this progress, the authors of said research have confirmed that the nature of said feedback is minimum, as it assists the programmer in correcting errors, but does not inform them of the reasons why the error occurs, which turns it more difficult to be construed and understood [3]. As a consequence, feedback is not completely formative because it does not become task-specific, corrective, and positive [30,33].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An empirical evaluation of the formative feedback supported by dashboard in the context of compilation error

Sánchez-Santillán

Fernandez-Medina

Pérez

et al. 2023

Comp Applic In Engineering

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Formative feedback is one of the most recognized types of feedback in academics. However, for feedback to be effective it must be task‐specific, immediate, corrective and positive. At present, automatic feedback is far from these characteristics and leaves the instructor as a fundamental agent in the teaching‐learning process of programming. Faced with this scenario, the lecturer needs support tools that help them to give formative feedback in educational scenarios with many students and little time. In this paper, we have demonstrated that, by using a tool called COLMENA, any lecturer may give students effective formative feedback which is task‐specific, immediate and corrective. COLMENA is a system that combines real‐time Eclipse IDE data retrieval on compilation errors and analytical dashboards in a webapp solution for lecturers and students. In this study, two different approaches have been compared, considering two academic courses with and without COLMENA feedback, respectively. The results indicate that novice students receiving feedback from the lecturer via COLMENA reduced their errors, demonstrating that feedback generated from compilation errors is effective.

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“…On the other hand, over 54 % of all students disagreed on this point. Becker et al (2019) point out that more research is required for generating proper diagnostic messages by compilers, especially with respect to new learners. Future research should also include security related diagnostics.…”

Section: Dieter Pawelczakmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching Security in Introductory C-Programming Courses

Pawelczak

2020

6th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'20)

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The challenges in the age of digitalization demand that universities qualify their computer science and engineering graduates well with respect to IT Security (information technology security). In engineering education such lectures are often offered as an elective subject, only. We propose to teach security aspects with respect to robustness and correctness already in the introductory programming course and therefore to cover at least parts of the overall field of IT Security as a compulsory subject for all students. The paper describes the integration of some rules and recommendations from the SEI Cert C Coding Standard into our introductory C programming course and discusses our experience with the course over the last two years with respect to its contents, realization, evaluation and examination.

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Unexpected Tokens

Cited by 13 publications

References 13 publications

Understanding Xacro Misunderstandings

Understanding Xacro Misunderstandings

An empirical evaluation of the formative feedback supported by dashboard in the context of compilation error

Teaching Security in Introductory C-Programming Courses

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