Tutoring model to guide students in programming courses to create complete and correct solutions

Abstract

When a student starts in a programming course, he begins to solve problems with a programming language and has to face some difficulties like programming inexperience, algorithm unawareness and, in some cases, the amateurishness of how to test a solution. The technological tools for developing programs and computer systems heavily explore the syntax and semantics of a program, but do not provide support to determine its correctness. This is where students may fail by not exploring the correct scenarios and test cases. In this paper, we present a tutoring model that helps creating entire exercises to guide students to generate not only correct, but also complete solutions. We tested this model supported by an automatic tool, which was used by 376 students of four different courses, getting excellent results. Guidelines for the model, the tool and our result are discussed in this paper.