Abstract—Presently, C++ programming has been taught in
many universities around the world as the first object-oriented
programming language for undergraduate students to start
studying programming concepts and computer architecture.
However, many of them may struggle in studying C++
programming due to the nature in the formal language. Thus,
hands-on self-study tools can be effective. In previous, we have
developed Java programming learning assistant system (JPLAS)
for assisting self-study of Java programming. JPLAS offers the
value trace problem (VTP) for novice students to study Java
programming through code reading study. In a VTP instance,
actual values of important variable or standard output
messages in a given source code are questioned, where the
correctness of each answer is checked through string matching.
In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of VTP for
hands-on self-study of C++ programming by novice students.
We generated 37 VTP instances for basic grammar concepts
using source codes in textbooks or websites for C++
programming, and asked 46 students in three universities in
three countries to solve them using the answer interface for
JPLAS. The results suggest that most of the students are
satisfactory, but some students need cares at early
programming study stage.
Index Terms—C++ programming, code reading, grammar
concepts, value trace problem.
S. L. Aung and N. Funabiki are with Okayama University, Okayama,
Japan (e-mail: p1pp6ypa@s.okayama-u.ac.jp, funabiki@okayama-u.ac.jp).
N. K. Dim and S. M. M. Aye are with Yangon University, Yangon,
Myanmar (e-mail: nemkdim@gmail.com, smyamyaaye@gmail.com).
H. H. S. Kyaw is with Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology,
Tokyo, Japan (e-mail: htoohtoosk@go.tuat.ac.jp).
Cite: Shune Lae Aung, Nem Khan Dim, Soe Mya Mya Aye, Nobuo Funabiki, and Htoo Htoo Sandi Kyaw, "Investigation of Value Trace Problem for C++ Programming Self-study of Novice Students," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 12, no. 7, pp. 631-636, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).