Achievements Visualization in Programming Education

Programming education focusing on the correctness of program behavior is often conducted with automated testing. However, it is difficult to instruct students about internal program quality since automated testing confirms only the external behavior of the program. Although there are a lot of quality measuring tools, results in these tools are so detailed or complicated that students cannot handle them. Besides, these tools do not give explicit criteria to judge the quality of the given program, thus students cannot figure out how high their program quality is. As a result, using these tools does not lead to improving the program quality. In this paper, we propose an educational method in which visualize the program quality by introducing a concept called achievement. We also introduce an implemented prototype system, Ave, to realize the proposed method.

I. INTRODUCTION

There are many methods in programming education based on automated testing, in which submitted programs are built and tested automatically [1]. Evaluation in such methods is performed by whether they passed the tests teachers defined in advance. We call such methods as test-based education in this paper. Test-based education has a certain effect on motivating students for programming since the success or failure of their assignment can be determined automatically and immediately. It is also capable of reducing the burden on teachers because they no longer need to check all the assignments [1].