Soploon: A virtual assistant to help teachers to detect object‐oriented errors in students’ source codes

Abstract

When checking students’ source codes, teachers tend to overlook some errors. This work introduces Soploon, a tool that automatically detects novice programmer errors. By using this tool, teachers can reduce the number of overlooked errors. Thus, students receive a more complete and exhaustive feedback about their errors and misconceptions.

Educational Programming Environments for Enhancing Conceptual Design in the Object-Oriented Paradigm: A Systematic Mapping Study

“…The existence or the planning of an evaluation of the proposed tool was also a condition to include a study to this research. From the selected studies one described an evaluation that is planned to take place (Yang et al, 2015) and the rest of the studies (Alonso et al, 2008; Alonso & Py, 2009; Ardimento et al, 2020; Azimullah et al, 2020; Blau & Moss, 2015; de Andrade Gomes et al, 2017; Dietrich & Kemp, 2008; Dominique et al, 2013; Fehnker & de Man, 2019; Hashiura et al, 2009; Herout & Brada, 2015; Mirmotahari et al, 2019; Silva & Dorça, 2019; Vallejos et al, 2018; Yan et al, 2020; Yang et al, 2018; Zaw et al, 2018) presented a completed evaluation. From the evaluation data, the most accurate and complete were the study evaluation context [V6], the number of participants [V7], and the evaluation outcome [V8].…”

“…In two studies (Alonso et al, 2008; Alonso & Py, 2009) the tool utilized did not take into account the correctness of alternative solutions of the students. Vallejos et al (2018) came to the conclusion that it is impossible for the proposed tool to detect some specific errors. All these outcomes come to an agreement with Herout & Brada (2015) who mention that fully automatic validation is not a solution to all the problems.…”

“…Students who were using the tool by Herout & Brada (2015) found out its usefulness while they were using it. In some cases, the proposed tool helped on the discovery of OOP errors while the instructors were using it (Vallejos et al, 2018), and on checking of the quality of learning materials (Fehnker & de Man, 2019). Except for the positive results about the effectiveness of the tools and the observations of the tools, there were also limitations discovered.…”

“…Students receive real time feedback about their exercise completion status (Dietrich & Kemp, 2008) DPLab DPLab is an eclipse IDE plugin that assists students to learn design patterns. The plugin provides guides and exercises about several design patterns which can be accessed through eclipse (Vallejos et al, 2018) Soploon The proposed tool is an eclipse plugin which analyzes students' code and detects automatically novice programmer errors…”

Automated Grading and Feedback Tools for Programming Education: A Systematic Review

“…Only six papers evaluate the feedback by comparing the automatically generated feedback to human-generated feedback [74,113,119,144,170,183]. Table 3 shows the count of tools by different evaluation techniques that involved comparing the results from the AAT with a human and the authors' sentiment of the performance of the AAT.…”