Analysis and Visualization of Patterns in Answers to Programming Problems

Abstract

It is not an easy task for teachers to make students' answers for programming exercises. In scoring such a student program, the teacher needs to evaluate not only the degree of program achievement but also which way the program achieve the requirements. In order to solve such problems, we propose a supporting method to evaluate the program using "prog2vec", which is software that converts a program into its feature vector representation. Specifically, our method estimates whether a programming problem needs certain ways to achieve its purpose or not. The input of the method is a set of the programs that are made as answer for the problem. If the method estimates that specific ways are needed to achieve the given problem, it also visualizes these programing ways in structural graph representation. In this way, our proposed method helps teachers that have a lot of and various answers for a programming problem to define evaluation criteria for those answers.