Programming Exercise System to Ascertain Students’ Coding Status

Abstract

Teachers need to monitor students’ progress in coding classes, which becomes difficult when there are many students. In this study, we developed a programming exercise support system that presents students’ coding status to the teachers with the aim of improving lessons. This system provides a Web-based programming environment for students. The system accumulates the exercise numbers that students work on as operation logs, as well as the operations and results of editing, building, execution, and testing programs. In addition, it presents teachers with each student’s progress, the source code creation process, and the occurrence of errors. This system consists of functions for students, instructors in charge of seminars and teaching assistants, and course chiefs. The system currently only focuses on C language. Approximately 230 students used this system for seven weeks on two subjects taught in class. The number of logs varied from day to day, thousands to over 100,000 logs were collected and accumulated per day. Based on user comments, we evaluated the system from five viewpoints of FURPS (Functionality, Usability, Reliability, Performance, Supportability). It was confirmed that the function of "ascertaining the student's coding status," which is the purpose of this research, was achieved. Teachers can use the insights provided by our system to guide students in real time.