PencilCode: 3.8 Million Anonymized Student Program Traces

PencilCode Program Traces are anonymized records of student interactions with a programming environment. The dataset is associated with a research paper titled 'Modeling Student Learning with 3.8 Million Program Traces' and is maintained by a team from Stanford, MIT, and the University of Florida. Access requires manual approval from the Pencil Code team.

Use Cases

• Modeling student learning progression based on program trace sequences.
• Analyzing common programming errors and debugging patterns from trace data.
• Developing intelligent tutoring systems that adapt based on inferred student knowledge states.

Strengths

• Dataset is explicitly linked to a published research paper, providing academic context.
• The description references a specific scale of 3.8 million program traces.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Pencil Code team, with contacts from Stanford, MIT, and the University of Florida.

Collection Method

Likely collected from student use of the PencilCode programming environment.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-05 06:50:27; freshness should be verified.