Preliminary Evaluation of Learning Support System Capable of Automatically Generating Program Trace Exercise

Abstract

Program tracing is an effective method to overcome ambiguous understanding in programming education. To provide explicit program tracing tasks, a learning support system has been developed. Positive results were demonstrated in evaluation experiments using this system. However, the system only handles pre-registered questions and feedback by the creator, making it difficult to be used in a more general context. To address this, the authors developed a system that can automatically generate problems and feedback by analyzing arbitrary programs, enabling learners to think about errors in their own programs and conduct debugging exercises. This paper describes the evaluation experiments using the developed system and its results, which revealed areas requiring improvement in future development.