Strategy-based feedback in a programming tutor

Abstract

More and more people take up learning how to program: in schools and universities, in large open online courses or by learning it by themselves. A large number of tools have been developed over the years to support learners with the difficult task of building programs. Many of these tools focus on the resulting program and not on the process: they fail to help the student to take the necessary steps towards the final program.We have developed a prototype of a programming tutor to help students with feedback and hints to progress towards a solution for an introductory imperative programming problem. We draw upon the ideas of a similar tutor for functional programming and translate these ideas to a different paradigm. Our tutor is based on model solutions from which a programming strategy is derived, capturing the different paths to these solutions. We allow for variation by expanding the strategy with alternatives and using program transformations. The instructor is able to adapt the behaviour of the tutor by annotating the model solutions.We show a tutoring session to demonstrate that a student can arrive at a solution by following the generated hints. We have found that we can recognise between 33% and 75% of student solutions to three programming exercises that are similar to a model solution, which we can increase by incorporating more variations.

Ask-Elle: an Adaptable Programming Tutor for Haskell Giving Automated Feedback

“…We believe, however, that our approach based on programming strategies is also applicable to other programming languages and programming paradigms, because the concepts on which our approach is based, such as strategies, refinement rules, and program transformations, are applicable to every programming language. A prototype of a tutor for introductory imperative programming problems that is based on the same technologies was recently presented by Keuning et al (2014).…”

Current State and Next Steps on Automated Hints for Students Learning to Code

“…When a student asks for a hint or deviates from the path, a hint can be shown to direct the student back on track. In some of the ATS-tools, the model solutions can be annotated to allow variation or to write messages displayed to the students as hints [15]. This gives the tutor control over what the correct solution is, but requires them to have vast experience and suffers from scalability issue when the programming assignments grow complex.…”

“…Since the set of possible solutions is large, normalization methods are used to match both submitted code and the solutions so that semantically identical code can be matched. Natural variations, such as identifier names and white-spaces, can thus be ignored [5], [7], [15], [23]. When a target solution is identified, a path must be constructed to decide which actions the student has to do to reach that goal state and in what order those actions should be presented as hints.…”

“…However, most tools we have seen so far that can automatically generate hints seem to be evaluated on tiny problems, i.e., only a few lines of code [6], [10], [21], [22], [26], [27]. Also, it is quite common for the hinting tools not to support the full programming language [15] or lack support for classes [26].…”

O Uso de Tutores de Programação Inteligentes na Produção de Feedback para Estudantes em Tarefas de Programação: Uma Revisão Sistemática da Literatura

“…2016) eKeuning et al (2014) desenvolveram ferramentas de apoio à programação, que tem como objetivo facilitar o processo de aprendizagem de programação introdutória. Em contrapartida,,Glassman et al (2015) e Quinson e Oster (2015) mostram cursos online de programação, que simulam professores interativo capazes de fornecer feedback sobre soluções e indicar se o aluno está indo ou não pelo caminho certo.…”