# Data-Driven Analysis of Student Engagement in Time-Limited Computer Laboratories
## 5 Results
### Time-constrained patterns. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**Id** & **Pattern** & **Students** & **Students (\%)** \\ \hline \hline \multicolumn{4}{c}{_Repeated errors_} \\ \hline E12 & 1���  
Most of the attempts submitted in the very first minutes failed. Thirty students who accessed exercise 1 made a mistake in less than one minute (see pattern T1). By increasing the maximum gap threshold to 2 min, the number of failures for exercise 1 increases and some wrong queries for exercises 2 and 3 start to appear (patterns T4 and T3). By setting maxgap to 180, access-error patterns appear for most exercises (from T6 to T12), revealing that the practice to try to submit a solution very quickly is quite popular; in addition, T5 shows that 13% of students solved exercise 2 in less than 3 min (this particular exercise is the one that was solved, on average, in the shortest amount of time). Even though the required competences are slightly more advanced than in the previous exercise, students have already become familiar with the learning environment. By increasing the maximum gap threshold to 4 min, the access-success patterns related to exercise 2 become more frequent (pattern T13), and similar patterns occur for exercise 3 and 4 (pattern T14 and T15). When the maximum threshold is set to 5 min, the same pattern also occurs for exercise 6 (see pattern T19). Access-success patterns for exercises 1 and 5 do not appear when maxgap is set to 300, since they required more than 5 min to be solved. Patterns T16 to T19 show the percentage of students who solved exercises 2, 3, 4, and 6 in less than five minutes; considering such a time constrain, exercise 2 was solved by 21.4%, exercise 3 by 14.0%, exercise 4 by 17.7%, and exercise 6 by 10.7%. By setting _mingap_ to 600 and _maxgap_ to 900 (time intervals between 10 and 15 min), the extracted patterns (reported in Table 8) are all related to exercises 1, 3, and 5. This shows that these are the exercises for which the students encountered most of the issues. The difficulty level experienced by the students is not always directly related to the actual difficulty level of the exercises because other factors can have an influence, such as the familiarity with the learning environment, which plays an important role when the approach is mainly a trial-and-error one. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**Id** & **Pattern** & **Students** & **Students (\%)** \\ \hline T8 & 3 & 3 & 17.7 \\ \hline T9 & 4 & 4 & 32 & 14.9 \\ \hline T10 & 5 & 5 & 24 & 11.2 \\ \hline T11 & 6 & 6 & 30 & 14.0 \\ \hline T12 & 7 & 2 & 22 & 10.2 \\ \hline \multicolumn{4}{c}{maxgap = 240} \\ \hline T13 & 2 & 2 & 43 & 20.0 \\ \hline T14 & 3 & 30 & 14.0 \\ \hline T15 & 4 & 4 & 31 & 14.4 \\ \hline \multicolumn{4}{c}{maxgap = 300} \\ \hline T16 & 2 & 2 & 46 & 21.4 \\ \hline T17 & 3 & 3 & 14.0 \\ \hline T18 & 4 & 4 & 38 & 17.7 \\ \hline T19 & 6 & 6 & 23 & 10.7 \\ \hline T20 & 1 & 1 & 47 & 21.9 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 7: _Cont._
Of the students, 15.8% spent more than 30 min on exercise 1 before accessing exercise 2 (pattern L1). This points out once again the problems discussed previously about exercise 1. Another interesting pattern is L2: it reveals that 73.5% of students spent at least 30 min before accessing exercise 5 after having accessed exercise 1. Considering that the laboratory session lasted 90 min and consisted of 13 exercises of increasing difficulty, students proceeded very slowly (notice however that they are not supposed to finish all exercises in the lab, but to finish them as homework). The comparison between pattern L2 and pattern A2 shows that only 21 students accessed exercise 5 after 30 min (9.7% of all students, 10.3% of those who accessed exercise 1). Pattern L3 confirms the difficulties in solving the first exercises of the lab; 24 students (11.2%) who accessed exercise 1 accessed exercise 4 after at least half an hour and exercise 6 after another 30 min.