An Independent Learning System for Flutter Cross-Platform Mobile Programming with Code Modification Problems

Abstract

Nowadays, with the common use of smartphones in daily lives, mobile applications have become popular around the world, which will lead to a rise in Flutter framework. Developed by Google, Flutter with Dart programming provides a cross-platform development environment to create visually appealing and responsive user interfaces across mobile, web, and desktop platforms using a single codebase. However, due to time and staff limitations, the Flutter/Dart programming course is not included in curricula, even in IT departments in universities. Therefore, independent learning environments for students are essential to meet this growing popularity. Previously, we have developed programming learning assistant system (PLAS) as a web-browser-based self-learning platform for novice students. PLAS offers various types of exercise problems designed to cultivate programming skills step-by-step through a lot of code reading and code writing practices. Among them, one particular type is the code modification problem (CMP), which asks to modify the given source code to satisfy the new specifications. CMP is expected to be solved by novices with little effort if they have knowledge of other programming languages. Thus, PLAS with CMP will be an excellent platform for independent learning. In this paper, we present PLAS with CMP for the independent learning of Flutter/Dart programming. To improve the readability of the source code by students, we provided rich comments on grammar or behaviors. Besides, the code can be downloaded so that students can check and run it on an IDE. For evaluations, we generated 38 CMP instances for basic and multimedia/storage topics in Flutter/Dart programming and assigned them to 21 master students at Okayama University, Japan, who have never studied it. The results confirm the validity of the proposal.