Automatic On-line Generation of Student's Exercises in Teaching Programming

Abstract. Teaching programming faces some general teaching problems, but also confronts some specific problems such as understanding of programming concepts as well as algorithms for solving programming tasks. Our teaching experience with students at university beginner's level has shown that students often try to avoid understanding programming concepts by some "shortcuts", like learning program code by rote, copying programs from colleagues etc. In this paper we introduce automatic on-line generation of programming exercises with code examples for students. This enables high level personalization of student's programming tasks and makes avoiding of understanding concepts more difficult. Along with introduction of the on-line solution, some open questions about correctness of exercises, controlling the solutions and the whole teaching process are also discussed