A Proposal of Code Writing Problem for C Programming Learning Assistant System

Abstract

C programming has been a fundamental subject for a lot of university students studying programming lan guages, algorithms, and computer architecture. To enhance C programming education in schools, we have developed the C Programming Learning Assistant System (CPLAS) which provides a variety of programming assignments to cover different learning stages. The programming assignments offered by CPLAS allow the students to practice writing partial source code to learn grammar, code reading, and code debugging skills. However, the current assignments offered by CPLAS do not cover students to practice writing the whole C source code from scratch. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the Code Writing Problem (CWP) for students to write the C source code from scratch. In a CWP instance, a problem statement, an input list, and an expected output are given to the students. The students need to write the C source code from scratch by referring to the given information. The answer codes are marked through 1) compiling test, 2) execution test, and 3) output test. To avoid cheating by students, we use the random input generation method for each data type. To evaluate the proposal, we generated and assigned 11 CWP instances to the students. From their solution results, 10 out of 11 CWP instances achieved over 78% correct answer rate, and the feedback from the students confirmed the validity of the proposal.