Su Sandy Wint's research while affiliated with Okayama University and other places

Purpose-To advance Java programming educations, we have developed a Web-based Java programming learning assistant system (JPLAS). It offers the element fill-in-blank problem (EFP) for novice students to study Java grammar and basic programming skills by filling in the missing elements in a source code. An EFP instance can be generated by selecting an appropriate code, and applying the blank element selection algorithm. Since it is expected to cover broad grammar topics, a number of EFP instances have been generated. This paper proposes a recommendation function to guide a student solving the proper EFP instances among them. Design/methodology/approach-This function considers the difficulty level of the EFP instance and the grammar topics that have been correctly answered by the student, and is implemented at the offline answering function of JPLAS using JavaScript so that students can use it even without the Internet connections. Findings-To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposal, 85 EFP instances are prepared to cover various grammar topics, and are assigned to a total of 92 students in two universities in Myanmar and Indonesia to solve them using the recommendation function. Their solution results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposal. Originality/value-The concept of the difficulty level for an EFP instance is newly defined for the proper recommendation and the accuracy in terms of the average numbers of answer submission times among the students is verified.

Purpose To advance Java programming educations, the authors have developed a Web-based Java programming learning assistant system (JPLAS). It offers the element fill-in-blank problem (EFP) for novice students to study Java grammar and basic programming skills by filling in the missing elements in a source code. An EFP instance can be generated by selecting an appropriate code, and applying the blank element selection algorithm. As it is expected to cover broad grammar topics, a number of EFP instances have been generated. This paper aims to propose a recommendation function to guide a student solving the proper EFP instances among them. Design/methodology/approach This function considers the difficulty level of the EFP instance and the grammar topics that have been correctly answered by the student, and is implemented at the offline answering function of JPLAS using JavaScript so that students can use it even without the Internet connections. Findings To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposal, 85 EFP instances are prepared to cover various grammar topics, and are assigned to a total of 92 students in two universities in Myanmar and Indonesia to solve them using the recommendation function. Their solution results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposal. Originality/value The concept of the difficulty level for an EFP instance is newly defined for the proper recommendation, and the accuracy in terms of the average numbers of answer submission times among the students is verified.

To assist self-study of Java programming, we have developed Java programming learning assistant system (JPLAS). JPLAS offers the element fill-in-blank problem (EFP) for novice students to study grammar and basic programming skills through code reading. A lot of EFP instances have been generated by applying the blank element selection algorithm to various source codes to cover broad topics. Then, their applications to students found that some EFP instances could not be solved because students could not remember the corresponding keywords in Java programming. In this paper, we implement a hint function at the offline answering function for solving EFP instances in JPLAS using JavaScript that displays the missing keywords in the instance with the usages. We evaluate the proposal through applications to 40 undergraduate students in Indonesia, and confirm the improvement of the correct solution rate using the proposal. However, they still find difficulties in solving some topics. The improvements of the hint function will be in future works.

To offer self-study environments of Java programming, we have developed Java programming learning assistant system (JPLAS). In JPLAS, the element fill-in-blank problem (EFP) intends novice students to study grammar and basic programming skills through code reading. A lot of EFP instances have been generated by applying the blank element selection algorithm to various source codes to cover broad topics. Previously, we proposed the recommendation function to assist a student to choose a proper EFP instance to be solved, considering its difficulty level. However, it is not implemented at the offline answering function that allows a student to solve EFP without the Internet access on a Web browser. Besides, it does not consider the number of blanked elements in the EFP instance for the difficulty level and recently released Java grammar topics. In this paper, we implement the improved recommendation function to solve the drawbacks at the offline answering function using JavaScript. For evaluations, we generated 85 EFP instances covering new grammar topics, and confirmed the effectiveness through their applications to 40 undergraduate students in University of Yangon, Myanmar.