A rationale and description of a CAI program to teach the BASIC programming language

Abstract

A BASIC Instructional Program is being developed as a vehicle for research in tutorial modes of computer-assisted instruction (CAD. Several design features will be appropriate to training in other technical areas and applicable in other instructional settings where the development of analytic and problem-solving skills is a goal.Methods are incorporated for monitoring and aiding the student as he works on programming problems in the BASIC language. The instructional program developed can be used to investigate schemes for optimizing problem presentation and giving assistance during problem-solving based on a model of the student's abilities and difficulties. Previous experience in the instructional and technical aspects of teaching a programming language indicates that a course in computer programming can be designed to help the student acquire programming concepts in a personalized and efficient manner as he develops skills at increasingly advanced levels.This article reports on work currently in progress and briefly summarizes observations and conclusions based on operation during the pilot year.A major goal of the research project is to increase the sophistication with which the instructional program monitors the student's work and responds to it with appropriate hints and prompts. One aspect of such work is the utilization of algorithms for checking the correctness of a student procedure. Limited but sufficient program verification is possible through simulated execution of the program on test data stored with each problem. Within the controllable context of instruction, where the problems to be solved are predetermined and their solutions known, simulated execution of the student's program can effectively determine its closeness to a stored model solution.The BASIC Instructional Program (BIP) is written in SAIL (VanLehn, 1973;Swinehart and Sproull, 1971), a versatile, ALGOL-like language, implemented exclusively at present on the DEC P D P -1 0 computer. SAIL includes a flexible associative sublanguage called LEAP (Feldman et al., 1972), which was used extensively to build BIP's information network. The course is now running on the P D P -1 0 TENEX timesharing system at the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences. It *This research is funded by Personnel Training and Research Programs, Office of Naval Research. During these developmental months, we have received considerable cooperation from the staffs of the pilot institutions, notably Professor Carl Grame of DeAnza College and Dr. Paul Lorton, Jr. of the University of San Francisco.

The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Vision and Getting From Here To There

“…Natural language has been a frequent choice for this capability (e.g., Brown, Burton, and DeKleer, 1982;Graesser, Person, and Magliano, 1995), but the language of mathematics, mathematical logic, electronics, and other well-structured communication systems have also been used (Barr, Beard, and Atkinson, 1975;Suppes, 1981;Sleeman and Brown, 1982;Psotka, Massey, and Mutter, 1988;Woolf and Regian, 2000).…”

“…This capability has been realized in systems that could converse in a formal language, such as computer programming [e.g., Binary Integer Programming (BIP) (Barr, Beard, and Atkinson (1975)] or propositional calculus [e.g., EXCHECK (Suppes, 1981)] or could base the conversation on determinate technical phenomena using clearly defined and well understood terms [e.g., SOPHIE, (Brown, Burton, and DeKleer, 1982)]. More recent research, such as that presented by Graesser, Gernsbacher, and Goldman (2003), suggests that significant natural language dialogue capabilities are achievable.…”

Comes

“…The latter solution is obviously preferable from the learner standpoint since i t allows a complete and continuous monitoring of his activities . Several examples of advanced CAI systems based on aritficial intelligence techniques, are described in the literature [2,5] ; and, for instance, in [6] and [9] an interesting system is presented whic h assists students in learning BASIC . However, this advanced approach has not been implemented for the following reasons .…”