Emotion recognition is a field of study that is much investigated by researchers because it is an important piece in the development of intelligent system. Researchers used different techniques to capture the emotional response of the people based on the situation and design patterns to see its effects and relevance. In this paper, the researchers investigated the emotional patterns of the students towards programming using input devices such as keyboard and mouse. The use of keyboard and mouse provided an affordable and non-intrusive method of collecting data. The keyboard and mouse data collected were mapped by an expert on facial expressions to emotions captured on video at the same the students were answering the programming problem. From these annotations, the classes of emotions were derived. Rapid miner was then used to identify the pattern of keyboard and mouse strokes that corresponds to different emotions. The accuracy of the results were 70.25% and with a Kappa of 0.612%.

Modern humans interact with a variety of electronic devices to accomplish tasks, entertain themselves and to communicate with others. Traditionally this interaction has been conceived of as being the interaction between a user and a tool. There is no emotional value in that interaction, it is not social. The interaction is merely functional. The problem with that approach is that humans do express emotions toward computers, smart phones and other computational devices. Some of the concepts involved in the computer science sub-field of human-computer interaction describe these interactions as social and refer to computers as social actors. If computers are to be treated social actors, then emotions must be considered in evaluation of the interactions in which they take part. Despite the anthropomorphist properties that some in the computer science discipline apply to computers, computers, including artificial intelligences, do not experience feelings. Therefore, the concept of emotions in human-computer interaction must be considered through different frameworks and from the perspective of the human actors involved. Humans develop social relationships with their technology (Nass 1994). Like any relationship involving humans, the quality of the relationship is impacted by the emotional exchanges involved. Emotion is an important component of human-computer interaction because of the amount of time that humans spend with their devices and because the capability to interact successfully with other humans depends upon strong social and emotional skills.