A Learning Support Method for Novice Programmers based on Categorization of Compilation Error Messages

Abstract

When novice programmer studies programming skills, if one syntactic miss causes many compilation error messages, he/she may not solve the errors easily and this causes disturbance his/her studiying. In this work, we propose a learning support method based on categorization of compilation error mesages. The categorization is formed by causes of the messages which are identified by incremental procedures of compilation and modification. Then the method indicates messages with the categorization. This makes novice programmers to remove syntactic misses with many compilation error messages in one compilation time easier. To validate the effectiveness, we evaluated our method with compilation errors and source codes which the errors are occurred in programming class for a first-year university students. As the result of the evaluation using 1,000 compilation errors, our method categorized error messages of 636 compilation errors.