A Study of Introductory Exercise Problems for Novice Students in Java Programming Learning Assistant System

Nowadays, Java programming is often taught in an introductory Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) course to novice students in universities around the world. In this course, students need to be familiar with typing source codes using computers first. Then, they will learn the grammar and syntax of Java from introductory levels. For effective studies, dedicated exercise problems for them should be implemented in Java Programming Learning Assistant System (JPLAS) that has been developed in our group to assist self-studies at home. In this paper, we present a study of three exercise problems in JPLAS that are dedicated to novice students, namely, code typing problem (CTP), code fixing problem (CFP), and value trace problem (VTP). A CTP instance requests to type a given source code on a computer. A CFP instance requests to type a given erroneous code while fixing the errors. A VTP instance requests to answer the values of important variables in a given code. The correctness of any answer is checked through string matching on the answer interface on a web browser. For evaluations, we generated and assigned five CTP, 10 CFP, and 10 VTP instances to first-year undergraduate students in two related courses at State Polytechnic of Malang, Indonesia. In the results, most students correctly solved all the questions, where a statistically significant difference in the time span between punctual and delayed students in completing the exercises, provided positive feedback for the usability questionnaire and achieved higher final exam scores in the courses than students who did not solve the instances. Thus, the effectiveness and validity of the proposal are confirmed.