Application of Programming Education Support Tool pgtracer for Homework Assignment

Abstract

We have developed a programming education support tool pgtracer implemented as a Moodle plug-in. Pgtracer provides fill-in-the-blank programming questions to the students and collects student log to analyze student's learning process and understanding level. In this paper, we apply pgtracer at an actual programming course to provide homework assignments to the students. We develop fill-in-the-blank questions based on the course syllabus at each week. Student activities on pgtracer are analyzed using various functions provided by pgtracer. The analysis results are utilized to analyze understanding level of each student and to develop questions for the succeeding weeks. We also provide the analysis result to the teacher about the activities and achievement of the students for better collaboration between lecture and homework. We received positive feedbacks from both of the teacher interview and student survey about the usefulness of pgtracer as programming education support tool.