{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/from-bugs-to-breakthroughs-novice-errors-in","title":"From Bugs to Breakthroughs: Novice Errors in CS2","arxiv_id":"2502.14438","date":"2025-02-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nadja Just","Janet Siegmund","Belinda Schantong"],"abstract":"Background: Programming is a fundamental skill in computer science and software engineering specifically. Mastering it is a challenge for novices, which is evidenced by numerous errors that students make during programming assignments. Objective: In our study, we want to identify common programming errors in CS2 courses and understand how students evolve over time. Method: To this end, we conducted a longitudinal study of errors that students of a CS2 course made in subsequent programming assignments. Specifically, we manually categorized 710 errors based on a modified version of an established error framework. Result: We could observe a learning curve of students, such that they start out with only few syntactical errors, but with a high number of semantic errors. During the course, the syntax and semantic errors almost completely vanish, but logical errors remain consistently present. Conclusion: Thus, students have only little trouble with learning the programming language, but need more time to understand and express concepts in a programming language.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14438v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14438v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"from-bugs-to-breakthroughs-novice-errors-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/cseeandt-25-errorpaper/cs2-error-categorization","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}