Illinois ASE Undergraduate Researchers Analyzed Contestant Performance of a Code Hunt Contest

Over the 2017 summer, a group of Illinois ASE undergraduate students, Adrian Clark, Jonathan Wells, and Jalen Coleman-Lands advised by Professor Tao Xie, in collaboration with PhD student Angello Astorga and high school student Andrew Xie, analyzed the Code Hunt data set (released by Microsoft Research) from a coding contest. Their undergraduate research was supported by the National Science Foundations.

Code Hunt from Microsoft Research is a web-based serious gaming platform being popularly used for various programming contests. Over the summer, the preceding students conducted analysis of the Code Hunt data set (players’ playing history) to focus on contestant performance released by Microsoft Research. This data set contains the programs written by students (only) worldwide during a contest over 48 hours. There are approximately 250 users, 24 puzzles and about 13,000 programs.

The initial results of the data analysis will be presented in the 2017 Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2017), Vancouver, Canada, October 2017

Adrian Clark, Jonathan Wells, Angello Astorga, Andrew Xie, Jalen Coleman-Lands, and Tao Xie. Preliminary Analysis of Contestant Performance for a Code Hunt Contest. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2017), Vancouver, Canada, October 2017. [PDF]

Great job, Adrian, Jonathan, Angello, Andrew, and Jalen!! 

Thank Microsoft Research for releasing the Code Hunt data set to engage the academic community to study such valuable educational data! 

Jalen Coleman-Lands, Jonathan Wells, Adrian Clark, Tao Xie,  Angello Astorga (from lef to right)

Jonathan Wells co-presented the workshop paper at the the 8th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2017), Vancouver, Canada.