An Educational Support System based on Automatic Impasse Detection in Programming Exercises

Abstract

In this paper, we develop an educational support system based on an automatic impasse detection method. In programming education, novice learners occasionally experience various impasses during coding exercises. A learner’s impasse log, which includes information such as the type of the impasses and timestamps at which they reached the impasses, would be useful for the learning and teaching of programming, such as for reflective learning and one- on-one instructions. Although several systems have been developed to understand students’ programming statuses, there is no system based on the students’ impasse in programming. We developed a ruleset to detect impasses automatically based on the indications of students’ codes and errors and improved the detection ability through an experimental introduction in actual classrooms. Using this framework, we developed a system that supports learners to perform reflective learning. We conducted a pilot experiment to evaluate the contribution of our system to reflective learning and obtained positive evaluation results.