An Implementation of Code Validation Function in C Programming Learning Assistant System

Abstract

In many universities around the world, C programming is offered as the first programming course. To help novice students learn on their own, we have developed the C Programming Learning Assistant System (CPLAS). Currently, CPLAS offers simple practice questions at the elementary level, where any question requires a word, a sentence, or a number as the answer and the student answer is checked against the correct answer by string matching. However, CPLAS does not cover the problems of writing source codes completely from scratch such that the correctness of each code must be validated automatically. In this paper, we present the implementation of the code validation function for validating the answer source code through 1) compiling test, 2) execution test, and 3) output test. Here, the software test approach using test codes is not adopted, because it might be too difficult for novice students. For evaluations, we applied the proposal to 2, 045 source codes from 43 first-year students at the C programming course in Nihon University, Japan. We analyzed the answer results and confirmed the effectiveness of the proposal. In future works, we will introduce this function in the CPLAS platform, which will be used to help students with self-studies.