Visually Analyzing Students' Gaze on C++ Code Snippets

Cole S Peterson (1) , Jonathan A Saddler (1) , Tanja Blascheck (2) , Bonita Sharif (1)

1 University of Nebraska–Lincoln
2 AVIZ - Analysis and Visualization

The paper presents an eye tracking study with 17 students (12 novices, 5 non-novices) reading C++ methods. The novices were students who participated in the study during the last week of their semester learning C++. The non-novices were senior students who had been exposed to programming before. We report on the reading behavior of three C++ methods that use different language constructs. We analyze fixations at the line level of the code using visualizations to derive insights into code reading. Results show that most transitions were made to code lines that are close to the current line read. We observe that a large percentage of the total fixation duration is made on a small number of lines and that related lines are often viewed together in a series of short fixations.

Keywords: visual analysis; eye tracking; program comprehension; C++ source code; scanpaths; transitions

Domains: Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]; Ubiquitous Computing; Programming Languages [cs.PL]

Cole S Peterson, Jonathan A Saddler, Tanja Blascheck, Bonita Sharif. Visually Analyzing Students' Gaze on C++ Code Snippets. EMIP 2019 - 6th International Workshop on Eye Movements in Programming, May 2019, Montreal, Canada. ⟨hal-02084148⟩