Novice program recognition/diagnosis system based on goal/plan concepts
Kenji Kaijiri · Systems and Computers in Japan · 1996
Abstract Studies on program understanding/recognition have been conducted from various points of view, including debugging. However, the target, the range and the kind of recognition, differ according to objectives. A new problem description method and a new recognition method whose objective is to help novices learn program design and debugging is proposed here. This method has the following characteristics: It uses the algorithm level problem description. It is called the problem solution tree. The problem solution tree has positional information regarding goals. It uses a variety of matching methods to enable matching with many erroneous student programs. It uses a partial recognition strategy to diagnose programs with which full matching failed. The system recognized that approximately 85 percent of the novice samples are not well formed.