A First Step in Learning Analytics: Pre-processing Low-Level Alice Logging Data of Middle School Students

Educational data mining can miss or misidentify key findings about student learning without a transparent process of analyzing the data. This paper describes the first steps in the process of using low-level logging data to understand how middle school students used Alice, an initial programming environment. We describe the steps that were required and the decisions that were made in building a tool to translate the low-level logging data into a form that can be used to investigate educational questions about problem solving strategies for a range of different programming tasks. This work contributes to efforts to analyze educational data, and is important for researchers and tool builders involved with the design of logging systems for other programming environments and software tools.