Question Authoring for Learning Programming Skills based on the Programmed Visual Content Comparison Method

This paper discusses a question authoring function of the Programmed Visual Contents Comparison Method (PVCC). With this method, by comparing two displayed pictures produced by programming samples (a question), a learner must decide which one the programs producing those pictures is the more difficult to build by programming, or if the difficulty is similar for all of them. After the learners answered the sample comparison, the PVCC test system returns the correct answer and detailed explanation of the question to make sure their understanding and improve their skill. A question in the PVCC test is to evaluate and to promote learners' programming skills related to a specific programming concept. Question for the PVCC test is hard to generate automatically because a programming concept is distributed and implicit in a program, and depends on the structure of arbitrary programs. Therefore, we design and prototype an authoring function to store programming samples, to combine samples and generate a question and to organize the test for the PVCC test system.

I. Introduction

Recently, the software development environment has made remarkable progress such as simplified libraries, and several visual software development tools and languages in which the programming code is hidden and it can apply with just a click. Besides, various kinds of programming code samples and their explanations or tutorials are on the web and are referred to as programming libraries by nowadays programmers. Considering these circumstances, finding the best-suited function within the libraries has become an important task.