An Interactive Programming Assistance tool (iPAT) for instructors and novice programmers

This paper describes an Interactive Programming Assistance tool (iPAT) which is designed to assist students in solving introductory programming problems and help instructors in conducting programming lab sessions effectively. In a large computer lab setting with over 30 students, communication can be very limited between the students and the lab instructors. To address this problem iPAT was developed. It allows students to undertake programming exercises and receive interactive guidance in getting their programs to compile and run. This is the only tool developed to assist students and instructors in solving their practical lab session problems, which comes with features such as error handling, remote access, handling PC inventory and a solution archive to solve common errors in C# programming. To ensure the accuracy of the system, it was deployed in a LAN network of twenty computers which gave the idea of virtual lab environment. Then eighteen undergraduates were asked to rank the usefulness of the system based on a five point scale. According to the provided rankings an average rating of 4.3 was obtained.