Manuscript received March 27, 2023; revised April 15, 2023; accepted May 8, 2023.
Abstract—Nowadays, Java is one of the world’s most used object-oriented programming languages for its dependability and portability. To assist the self-studies of novice students, we have developed the Java programming learning assistance system (JPLAS). JPLAS offers several types of exercise problems for different difficulties, including the grammar-concept understanding problem (GUP), the mistake correction problem (MCP), the element fill-in-blank problem (EFP), and the phrase fill-in-blank problem (PFP), where a question asks to answer the corresponding keyword or phrase in the given source code. Unfortunately, some students cannot solve them well as the difficulty level is ascending. In this paper, to help such students, we propose a hint function that will show the first or more characters of each correct answer word in the answer interface on a web browser for JPLAS, when requested. The use of this function by a student can be traced by a teacher to analyze the performance and problem difficulty. For evaluations, we generated three instances for GUP, MCP, EFP, and PFP respectively, and assigned them to junior students taking the Java programming course in Okayama University, Japan. Their answer results found that the proposal is effective in helping students solve exercise problems in JPLAS, but the thinking time needs to be adjusted for PFP.
Index Terms—C programming, CPLAS, mistake correction
problem, automatic generation, answer interface
Yanhui Jing, Nobuo Funabiki*, Soe Thandar Aung, Xiqin Lu are with the
Department of Information and Communication Systems, Okayama
University, Okayama, Japan. E-mail: pf709l29@s.okayama-u.ac.jp (Y.J.)
Htoo Htoo Sandi Kyaw is with Division of Advanced Information
Technology and Computer Science, Tokyo University of Agriculture and
Technology, Tokyo, Japan. E-mail: htoohtoosk@go.tuat.ac.jp (H.H.S.)
Kiyoshi Ueda is with the Department of of Computer Science Nihon
University, Koriyama, Japan. E-mail: ueda.kiyoshi@nihon-u.ac.jp (K.U.)
*Correspondence: funabiki@okayama-u.ac.jp (N.F.)
Cite: Yanhui Jing, Nobuo Funabiki*, Soe Thandar Aung, Xiqin Lu, Htoo Htoo Sandi Kyaw, and Kiyoshi Ueda, "A Proposal of Hint Function for Java Programming Learning Assistant System," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 13, no. 11, pp. 1828-1834, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 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).