Fill-in-the-blank Questions for Objected-Oriented Programming Education
Miyuki Murata, Naoko Kato, Tetsuro Kakeshita · 2021
Object-oriented technology is important to improve software quality from various perspectives. We have developed pgtracer, a programming education tool that provides fill-in-the-blank questions for the C programming language. By analyzing the data collected by using pgtracer in actual classes, we have obtained useful knowledge for C programming education. In this paper, we develop fill-in-the-blank questions for Java programs to extend pgtracer for object-oriented programming. The fill-in-the-blank question consists of a set of programs and trace tables. A program and a trace table respectively correspond to a Java class and an instance. A trace table contains message sendings between instances, which are important for understanding the behavior of object-oriented programs. Furthermore, we introduce blanks that students do not need to fill. This provides more flexibility in setting the difficulty level while reducing the student workload to fill the blanks. The proposed fill-in-the-blank questions will be used in actual classes, and the collected learning data will be analyzed to understand students' answering behavior and their weak points. The obtained findings are expected to be used to measure the learning outcome and improve object-oriented programming education.