Eye Tracking in Computing Education

The methodology of eye tracking has been gradually mak-ing its way into various fields of science, assisted by the diminishing cost of the associated technology. In an inter-national collaboration to open up the prospect of eye move-ment research for programming educators, we present a case study on program comprehension and preliminary analyses together with some useful tools. The main contributions of this paper are (1) an introduc-tion to eye tracking to study programmers; (2) an approach that can help elucidate how novices learn to read and un-derstand programs and to identify improvements to teaching and tools; (3) a consideration of data analysis methods and challenges, along with tools to address them; and (4) some larger computing education questions that can be addressed (or revisited) in the context of eye tracking