Assisting Students in Finding Bugs and their Locations in Programming Solutions

Teaching experience shows that programming is time consuming and can be acquired with substantial practice. Besides, students need to know whether their solutions are correct or incorrect and the root causes of their errors. Thus, teaching programming in a large class requires considerably many teaching assistants, which is costly. More importantly, a communication means that can support students virtually anytime is also desirable. In order to handle these problems, a static method was applied to build an online intelligent tutoring system that can assist students checking their solutions. In addition, when detecting the errors, this system can suggest students to investigate the suspected code. This feature is really significant for students to self-practice and improve their learning.