Search Results (2)

Presently, Java is a fundamental object-oriented programming language that can be mastered by any student in information technology or computer science. To assist both teachers and students, we developed the Java Programming Learning Assistant System (JPLAS). It offers several types of practice problems with different levels and learning goals for step-by-step self-study, where any answer is automatically marked in the system. One challenge for teachers that is addressed with JPLAS is the generation of proper exercise problems that meet learning requirements. We implemented programs for generating new problems from given source codes, as collecting and evaluating suitable codes remains time-consuming. In this paper, we present an automatic code generation tool using generative AI to solve this challenge. Prompt engineering is used to help generate an appropriate source code, and the quality is controlled by optimizing the prompt based on the outputs. For applications in JPLAS, we implement a web application system to automatically generate an element fill-in-the-blank problem (EFP) in JPLAS. For evaluation, we select the element fill-in-the-blank problem (EFP) as the target type in JPLAS and generate several instances using this tool. The results confirm the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method. Full article

A web-based Java programming learning assistant system (JPLAS) has been developed for novice students to study Java programming by themselves while enhancing code reading and code writing skills. One type of the implemented exercise problem is code writing problem (CWP), which asks students to create a source code that can pass the given test code. The correctness of this answer code is validated by running them on JUnit. In previous works, a Python-based answer code validation program was implemented to assist teachers. It automatically verifies the source codes from all the students for one test code, and reports the number of passed test cases by each code in the CSV file. While this program plays a crucial role in checking the correctness of code behaviors, it cannot detect code plagiarism that can often happen in programming courses. In this paper, we implement a code plagiarism checking function in the answer code validation program, and present its application results to a Java programming course at Okayama University, Japan. This function first removes the whitespace characters and the comments using the regular expressions. Next, it calculates the Levenshtein distance and similarity score for each pair of source codes from different students in the class. If the score is larger than a given threshold, they are regarded as plagiarism. Finally, it outputs the scores as a CSV file with the student IDs. For evaluations, we applied the proposed function to a total of 877 source codes for 45 CWP assignments submitted from 9 to 39 students and analyzed the results. It was found that (1) CWP assignments asking for shorter source codes generate higher scores than those for longer codes due to the use of test codes, (2) proper thresholds are different by assignments, and (3) some students often copied source codes from certain students. Full article