Nobuyoshi Yonezawa

A Real-time Monitoring System for Programming Education using a Generator of Program Animation Systems

We have developed a meta-system that generates program animation systems. The generated animation systems visually display changes in program actions and help students (novice programmers) understand them. The animation systems also accumulate historical records of the students’ operations as they execute a program step by step while trying to understand it. By analyzing accumulated records, the meta-system pinpoints common areas of dif- ficulty and their causes for the lecturer. To develop this meta-system, we first analyzed the relation between difficult to understand parts and records of which control operations students applied when using the program animation system. For this analysis, we developed a function enabling the program animation system to record each student’s history of operations. Next, we devised a technique to predict which parts of a program would be difficult for students to understand. Finally, we developed a generator of program animation systems based on this technique. Consequently, this meta- system enables lecturers to monitor the classroom learning of students in real-time and provide support to groups of students experiencing common difficulties.

Development of generator for lesson plan making support systems

This study has developed a generator system that generates various type of lesson plan making support systems automatically. The framework and items that each teacher needs are defined, and the generator automatically generates a lesson plan making support system according to the definition. First, this led to development of the formal definition of description format for describing lesson plans using the extended BNF notation. It becomes possible for the users to input and edit whatever they need according to the description format. The user can write a grammatically correct lesson plan and edit it without grammatical errors (healthness). Second, this developed a generator that automatically generates the Java source code of a system corresponding to the description format. The generator can deal with the frameworks and input items that various teachers want to have in their lesson plans (completeness). It can also generate a system according to each users purpose (generality).

A measure of dissimilarity between the structure of instructional material and the structure of the learner's understanding

The present paper investigates the construction of a navigation system that assists the learner in linking learning task so that the structure of the learners understanding will conform to the structure of instructional material. As an initial step, a measure of the dissimilarity between two digraphs expressing the structure of instructional material and the structure of learners understanding, respectively, is defined. Details concerning the navigation will be reported at a later date.