Virtual Reality offers many opportunities for use in learning and teaching. However, the creation of Virtual Reality learning opportunities need many resources. Systematic efforts are needed to design learning activities and prepare them for research to be able to show learning effectiveness in the future. This paper describes the planning, development and the evaluation method of Virtual Reality learning activities for Computer Graphics education. The focus is on the development process of the didactic concept, as well as the immersive Virtual Reality environment. Through the early integration of Learning Analytics components, the foundations for exploring insights into the learning processes are implemented. The methodical combination of software and didactic development offers the advantages of both approaches; the systematic collection of learning data enables early didactic monitoring and hypothesis generation for research.

First steps in programming often take place in a self-regulated learning process, online and without supervision or assistance of a teacher. When problems occur, novices depend on automated feedback from the programming learning environment or sample solutions, which do not necessarily fit the approach of the learners. Our goal is to identify and classify the problem-solving strategies of programming novices. In the long term, these insights might help with adaptive feedback fitting to the current trial of the individual player and to learn from strategies of successful learners. Using self-created visualization tools we found complex indicators for small-scale strategy patterns. These patterns, along with interaction data from the user interface, allow clustering the learners by their behaviour. Those insights should form a future basis for automatic recognition of strategies.

This working group asserts that Program Comprehension (PC) plays a critical part in the writing process. For example, this abstract is written from a basic draft that we have edited and revised until it clearly presents our idea. Similarly, a program is written in an incremental manner, with each step being tested, debugged and extended until the program achieves its goal. Novice programmers should develop their program comprehension as they learn to code, so that they are able to read and reason about code while they are writing it. To foster such competencies our group has identified two main goals: (1) to collect and define learning activities that explicitly cover key components of program comprehension and (2) to define possible learning trajectories that will guide teachers using those learning activities in their CS0/CS1 or K-12 courses.