and understand their behaviors to be familiar to the programming paradigm. Unfortunately, effective tools to support independent code reading study at home have not been well designed. Heretofore, we have proposed the value trace problem (VTP) for Java programming. A VTP instance consists of one source code, several questions, and the correct answers to them. Each question asks the value of a critical variable or output message in the source code. The correctness of any student answer is checked instantly by string matching at the answer interface for self-study. In this paper, we present the value trace problem (VTP) for code reading self-study of C programming. 42 VTP instances are generated using simple C source codes on basic grammar concepts and fundamental data structures & algorithms in textbooks and websites. In addition, for hard instances on pointer and algorithms, the devices of hints, multiple choice questions, and references are provided to improve their solution performances. For evaluations, we requested 49 undergraduate students in Japan, China, and Myanmar to independently solve them at home. Their average correct answer rate reached 94.29%, where our devices for hard instances improved it by 33.26%. Thus, the effectiveness of our proposal is confirmed in motivating self-study of C programming to novice students.

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C programming is taught in introductory programming courses in many universities across the world. To assist self-studies of novice students, we have developed C programming learning assistant system (CPLAS). In this paper, we study the grammar-concept understanding problem (GUP) in CPLAS for first-step studies of understanding grammar concepts in C programming. Each question describes the definition of a keyword in a source code and requests to answer it. Any answer is verified through string matching. If a student cannot answer questions, he/she does not understand basic concepts and may be lost in C programming study. For GUP, we selected 66 keywords with questions, and generated 35 instances that cover them. The assignment results to 130 undergraduate students in Okayama and Nihon Universities revealed the difficult keywords and learning progresses of students.