Solution spaces

This paper explores the idea of solution space in the context of novice programmers and code writing tasks. A definition for solution space is provided and an analysis of a series of code writing questions from a first year Java programming course's practical programming tests is provided to measure the impact of solution space size on the difficulty of a code writing question. We found that as the solution space size increases so does the difficulty of the question and that despite relatively high solutions spaces we see a very limited set of these solutions as student responses. Finally we conclude with some conjectures about the possible causes for the trends that we have observed.