The BlueJ Blackbox now available: large scale programming education data collection

Neil Brown announced this at ICER last week.  The new version of BlueJ now anonymously logs user actions onto a server for analysis by researchers.  I just signed up to get access to the site.  I have a couple of ideas for research projects using these data.  It’s pretty exciting: Big data comes to computing education research!

We have begun a data collection project, called Blackbox, to record the actions of BlueJ users. We’re inviting all the BlueJ users (with the latest version, 3.1.0, onwards) to take part. About 2 months in to the project, we already have 25,000 users who have agreed to take part, with 1,000 sending us data each day. Based on current estimates, I expect that in November 2013 we should see around 5,000 users sending data each day, with a total of over 100,000 users. Rather than hoarding the data, we are making this data available to other computing education researchers for use in their own research, so that we can all benefit from this project.

via Blackbox: large scale programming education data collection | Academic Computing.