A Study of Code Typing Problems as Start-Up Programming Practices in Java Programming Learning Assistant System

In many universities around the world, Java is popularly used for teaching basic programming to novice students. To accommodate this reality, we have developed Java Programming Learning Assistant System (JPLAS) as a self-study tool. JPLAS offers several types of exercise problems that have different learning goals and difficulty levels. However, they assume that learners are familiar with a code editor to type programming code, although they may be first-year undergraduate students and have no experience. In this paper, we present the Code Typing Problem (CTP) as a new type in JPLAS to help them practice code typing in an editor. CTP has two levels of exercises, namely, basic and advanced, to enhance its usage. The basic CTP requests to type the given code as it is in input forms. The advanced CTP gives a code with several errors of incorrect elements and requests to type the corrected code by understanding the grammar and behaviour. The error injection algorithm is presented to add errors in a code automatically. For evaluations, we generated 17 basic and 6 advanced CTP instances, and assigned them to 21 second-semester and 46 first-semester students in State Malang Polytechnic, Indonesia. Their answer results showed that most students solved all the instances correctly, which confirms the validity. However, as the number of solving students decreased in the advanced CTP, improvements will be necessary in future works.