A Proposal of Code Modification Problem for Web Client Programming Using JavaScript

Abstract

Programming Learning Assistant System (PLAS) has been developed as a web-based self-learning platform for programming. PLAS offers several types of exercise problems for code reading and code writing skills, namely, grammar-concept understanding problem (GUP), value trace problem (VTP), element fill-in-blank problem (EFP), code completion problem (CCP), and code writing problem (CWP), to support studies at various levels for C, C++, Java, Python, and JavaScript programming and each problem has different targets for the students. JavaScript is commonly used together with HTML and CSS, to introduce dynamic behaviors of web pages in web application systems. Thus, JavaScript should be studied along with them for web client programming. In this paper, we propose a code modification problem (CMP) as a new type in PLAS, to study web client programming using JavaScript. Since a web page is made by using various functions together, reading and understanding sample source codes using them will be an effective way. Actually, students should have a lot of practices in code reading before implementing source codes from scratch. The CMP instance gives a source code using the functions to be studied and the screenshot of the web page generated by it. Then, it requests to modify the code to generate another web page given by the screenshot. The correctness of any answer is checked through string matching with the correct one. For the evaluation, we generated 25 CMP instances and assigned them to 23 students in Okayama University. Their solution results confirm the validity of the proposal.