From the paper: 1. Introduction Knowledge about students’ mistakes and the time taken to fix errors is useful for many reasons. For example, Sadler et al [10]

From the paper: 1. Introduction Knowledge about students’ mistakes and the time taken to fix errors is useful for many reasons. For example, Sadler et al [10] suggest that understanding student misconceptions is important to educator efficacy. Knowing which mistakes novices are likely to make or finding challenging informs the writing of instructional materials, such as textbooks, and can help improve the design and impact of beginner’s IDEs or other educatoinal programming tools. In other words, yes, understanding what types of errors novice programmers make can be very interesting and useful.