A Proposal of Statement Fill-in-Blank Problem in Java Programming Learning Assistant System

As a reliable, portable, and practical programming language, Java has been educated in many universities and professional schools. To assist Java educations, we have developed a Web-based Java Programming Learning Assistant System (JPLAS). JPLAS provides the element fill-in-blank problem and the code writing problem. The former problem is designed for novice students to study the grammar and writing style of Java by filling correct words to the blanks in a given Java code that are automatically marked by checking coincidences with correct ones. The latter problem is for students to study writing Java codes for specifications described in natural language that are automatically verified using the test-driven development (TDD) method. Unfortunately, the transition between two problems is not smooth due to the difference in difficulties. In this paper, we propose the statement fill-in-blank problem in JPLAS to fill the gap by asking students to write one whole statement in a code where the correctness is verified by the TDD method. The blank statement is selected by generating the Program Dependence Graph (PDG) of the code and finding the statement that has the largest dependence with other ones. We verify the effectiveness of our proposal through applications to the Java programming course in our department.