S.Takei, A Method of Constructing Casebase for Evaluation Assistant of Novice Programs.pdfVIP

A Method of Constructing Case-base for Evaluation Assistant of Novice Programs Hiroyoshi Watanabe, Masayuki Arai and Shigeo Takei School of Science and Engineering, Teikyo University. 1-1 Toyosatodai Utsunomiya-shi Tochigi, 320-8551 Japan E-mail: {hiro,arai,takei}@ics.teikyo-u.ac.jp Abstract This paper presents a method of indexing cases for case-based evaluation assistant systems of novice programs. Program lists in evaluation cases should be represented in intact target programming language, because special forms of program lists put heavy burdens on teachers who are users of the systems. However, intact forms of program lists cannot cover that many variations. Therefore, indexes to cases should be constructed by using information of generalized program lists in order to expand the variations of program lists covered by one case. We propose a three level index of evaluation cases for novice programs written in a simple assembly language. Practical use in actual classes and retrieval experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed index method. Keywords: Program evaluation, Programming classes, Supporting teachers and Case-based reasoning. 1 Introduction In programming education, programming exercise courses play an important role, because writing programs is indispensable to learning programming. However, teachers workloads tend to be very heavy in typical programming exercise classes. Teachers give students various problems in order to get the students to understand important concepts in programming. Teachers give advice to students and they have to read very many programs and/or reports to see if the students understand the concepts.