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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Experience Report: Identifying Common Misconceptions And Errors Of Novice Programmers With Chatgpt, Hua Leong Fwa
Experience Report: Identifying Common Misconceptions And Errors Of Novice Programmers With Chatgpt, Hua Leong Fwa
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Identifying the misconceptions of novice programmers is pertinent for informing instructors of the challenges faced by their students in learning computer programming. In the current literature, custom tools, test scripts were developed and, in most cases, manual effort to go through the individual codes were required to identify and categorize the errors latent within the students' code submissions. This entails investment of substantial effort and time from the instructors. In this study, we thus propose the use of ChatGPT in identifying and categorizing the errors. Using prompts that were seeded only with the student's code and the model code solution …
Chatgpt, Can You Generate Solutions For My Coding Exercises? An Evaluation On Its Effectiveness In An Undergraduate Java Programming Course, Eng Lieh Ouh, Benjamin Gan, Kyong Jin Shim, Swavek Wlodkowski
Chatgpt, Can You Generate Solutions For My Coding Exercises? An Evaluation On Its Effectiveness In An Undergraduate Java Programming Course, Eng Lieh Ouh, Benjamin Gan, Kyong Jin Shim, Swavek Wlodkowski
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
In this study, we assess the efficacy of employing the ChatGPT language model to generate solutions for coding exercises within an undergraduate Java programming course. ChatGPT, a large-scale, deep learning-driven natural language processing model, is capable of producing programming code based on textual input. Our evaluation involves analyzing ChatGPT-generated solutions for 80 diverse programming exercises and comparing them to the correct solutions. Our findings indicate that ChatGPT accurately generates Java programming solutions, which are characterized by high readability and well-structured organization. Additionally, the model can produce alternative, memory-efficient solutions. However, as a natural language processing model, ChatGPT struggles with coding …
Achieving High Map-Coverage Through Pattern Constraint Reduction, Yingquan Zhao, Zan Wang, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Junjie Chen, Xiang Chen
Achieving High Map-Coverage Through Pattern Constraint Reduction, Yingquan Zhao, Zan Wang, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Junjie Chen, Xiang Chen
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Testing multi-threaded programs is challenging due to the enormous space of thread interleavings. Recently, a code coverage criterion for multi-threaded programs called MAP-coverage has been proposed and shown to be effective for testing concurrent programs. Existing approaches for achieving high MAP-coverage are based on random testing with simple heuristics, which is ineffective in systematically triggering rare thread interleavings. In this study, we propose a novel approach called pattern constraint reduction (PCR), which employs optimized constraint solving to generate thread interleavings for high MAP-coverage. The idea is to iteratively encode and solve path conditions to generate thread interleavings which are guaranteed …
Qlens: Visual Analytics Of Multi-Step Problem-Solving Behaviors For Improving Question Design, Meng Xia, Reshika P. Velumani, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu, Xiaojuan Ma
Qlens: Visual Analytics Of Multi-Step Problem-Solving Behaviors For Improving Question Design, Meng Xia, Reshika P. Velumani, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu, Xiaojuan Ma
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
With the rapid development of online education in recent years, there has been an increasing number of learning platforms that provide students with multi-step questions to cultivate their problem-solving skills. To guarantee the high quality of such learning materials, question designers need to inspect how students’ problem-solving processes unfold step by step to infer whether students’ problem-solving logic matches their design intent. They also need to compare the behaviors of different groups (e.g., students from different grades) to distribute questions to students with the right level of knowledge. The availability of fine-grained interaction data, such as mouse movement trajectories from …
Enhancing Developer Interactions With Programming Screencasts Through Accurate Code Extraction, Lingfeng Bao, Shengyi Pan, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang
Enhancing Developer Interactions With Programming Screencasts Through Accurate Code Extraction, Lingfeng Bao, Shengyi Pan, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Programming screencasts have become a pervasive resource on the Internet, which is favoured by many developers for learning new programming skills. For developers, the source code in screencasts is valuable and important. However, the streaming nature of screencasts limits the choice that they have for interacting with the code. Many studies apply the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technique to convert screen images into text, which can be easily searched and indexed. However, we observe that the noise in the screen images significantly affects the quality of OCRed code.In this paper, we develop a tool named psc2code, which has two components, …
Effectiveness Of Physical Robot Versus Robot Simulator In Teaching Introductory Programming, Oka Kurniawan, Norman Tiong Seng Lee, Subhajit Datta, Nachamma Sockalingam, Pey Lin Leong
Effectiveness Of Physical Robot Versus Robot Simulator In Teaching Introductory Programming, Oka Kurniawan, Norman Tiong Seng Lee, Subhajit Datta, Nachamma Sockalingam, Pey Lin Leong
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
This study reports the use of a physical robot and robot simulator in an introductory programming course in a university and measures students' programming background conceptual learning gain and learning experience. One group used physical robots in their lessons to complete programming assignments, while the other group used robot simulators. We are interested in finding out if there is any difference in the learning gain and experiences between those that use physical robots as compared to robot simulators. Our results suggest that there is no significant difference in terms of students' learning between the two approaches. However, the control group …
Vt-Revolution: Interactive Programming Video Tutorial Authoring And Watching System, Lingfeng Bao, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo
Vt-Revolution: Interactive Programming Video Tutorial Authoring And Watching System, Lingfeng Bao, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Procedural knowledge describes actions and manipulations that are carried out to complete programming tasks. An effective way to document procedural knowledge is programming video tutorials. Existing solutions to adding interactive workflow and elements to programming videos have a dilemma between the level of desired interaction and the efforts required for authoring tutorials. In this work, we tackle this dilemma by designing and building a programming video tutorial authoring system that leverages operating system level instrumentation to log workflow history while tutorial authors are creating programming videos, and the corresponding tutorial watching system that enhances the learning experience of video tutorials …
Understanding Stack Overflow Code Fragments, Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard
Understanding Stack Overflow Code Fragments, Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Code fragments posted in answers on Q&A forums can form an important source of developer knowledge. However, effective reuse of code fragments found online often requires information other than the code fragment alone. We report on the results of a survey-based study to investigate to what extent developers perceive Stack Overflow code fragments to be self-explanatory. As part of the study, we also investigated the types of information missing from fragments that were not self-explanatory. We find that less than half of the Stack Overflow code fragments in our sample are considered to be self-explanatory by the 321 participants who …
Rack: Code Search In The Ide Using Crowdsourced Knowledge, Mohammad Masudur Rahman, Chanchal K. Roy, David Lo
Rack: Code Search In The Ide Using Crowdsourced Knowledge, Mohammad Masudur Rahman, Chanchal K. Roy, David Lo
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Traditional code search engines often do not perform well with natural language queries since they mostly apply keyword matching. These engines thus require carefully designed queries containing information about programming APIs for code search. Unfortunately, existing studies suggest that preparing an effective query for code search is both challenging and time consuming for the developers. In this paper, we propose a novel code search tool-RACK-that returns relevant source code for a given code search query written in natural language text. The tool first translates the query into a list of relevant API classes by mining keyword-API associations from the crowdsourced …
A More Accurate Model For Finding Tutorial Segments Explaining Apis, He Jiang, Jingxuan Zhang, Xiaochen Li, Zhilei Ren, David Lo
A More Accurate Model For Finding Tutorial Segments Explaining Apis, He Jiang, Jingxuan Zhang, Xiaochen Li, Zhilei Ren, David Lo
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Developers prefer to utilize third-party libraries when they implement some functionalities and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are frequently used by them. Facing an unfamiliar API, developers tend to consult tutorials as learning resources. Unfortunately, the segments explaining a specific API scatter across tutorials. Hence, it remains a challenging issue to find the relevant segments. In this study, we propose a more accurate model to find the exact tutorial fragments explaining APIs. This new model consists of a text classifier with domain specific features. More specifically, we discover two important indicators to complement traditional text based features, namely co-occurrence APIs and …
A Large Scale Study Of Multiple Programming Languages And Code Quality, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Withthige Dinusha Ruchira Wijedasa, David Lo
A Large Scale Study Of Multiple Programming Languages And Code Quality, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Withthige Dinusha Ruchira Wijedasa, David Lo
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Nowadays, most software use multiple programming languages to implement certain functionalities based on the strengths and weaknesses of different languages. Researchers in the past have studied the impact of independent programming languages on software quality, however, there has been little or no research on the impact of multiple languages on the quality of software. Does the use of multiple languages cause more bugs? Are certain languages when used with other languages make software more bug prone? What are the relationships between multi-language usage and various bug categories? In this study, we perform a large scale empirical investigation to shed light …
Contract-Based General-Purpose Gpu Programming, Alexey Kolesnichenko, Christopher M. Poskitt, Sebastian Nanz, Bertrand Meyer
Contract-Based General-Purpose Gpu Programming, Alexey Kolesnichenko, Christopher M. Poskitt, Sebastian Nanz, Bertrand Meyer
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Using GPUs as general-purpose processors has revolutionized parallel computing by offering, for a large and growing set of algorithms, massive data-parallelization on desktop machines. An obstacle to widespread adoption, however, is the difficulty of programming them and the low-level control of the hardware required to achieve good performance. This paper suggests a programming library, SafeGPU, that aims at striking a balance between programmer productivity and performance, by making GPU data-parallel operations accessible from within a classical object-oriented programming language. The solution is integrated with the design-by-contract approach, which increases confidence in functional program correctness by embedding executable program specifications into …
Adaptive Gameplay For Programming Practice, Chris Boesch, Sandra Boesch
Adaptive Gameplay For Programming Practice, Chris Boesch, Sandra Boesch
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Over the past four years, we have collaborated to develop a set of online games to enable users to practice software languages in a self-directed manner and as part of a class. Recently we introduced a new adaptive difficulty feature that enables players to self-regulate the difficulty of the games they are playing to practice. These new features also provide additional information to further adapt the problem content to better meet the needs of the users.
Tournament-Based Teaching, Shannon Christopher Boesch, Sandra Boesch
Tournament-Based Teaching, Shannon Christopher Boesch, Sandra Boesch
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Over the past two years we have collaborated to develop a process and set of online games to enable additional feedback to both students and instructors in a classroom setting. We have named the resulting process Tournament-based Teaching due to the extensive use of tournament-based feedback for groups and individuals throughout course delivery. Tournament-based Teaching enables individualized and peer-based learning in a classroom setting and provides additional motivation for students to prepare for classroom sessions. It also provides feedback to instructors, which can be leveraged to provide better schedule classroom sessions.
Case Study On Using A Programming Practice Tool For Evaluating University Applicants, Shannon Christopher Boesch, Kevin Steppe
Case Study On Using A Programming Practice Tool For Evaluating University Applicants, Shannon Christopher Boesch, Kevin Steppe
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
We used a programming practice tool to test basic programming skills of prospective students. A live competition was used to test those skills. Students who did well were asked for further interviews. Most students had no prior background and reported learning the basics of two programming languages within two weeks of self-study.
Concernlines: A Timeline View Of Co-Occurring Concerns, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey
Concernlines: A Timeline View Of Co-Occurring Concerns, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Understanding the evolution of a software system requires understanding how information about the release history, non-functional requirements and project milestones relates to functional requirements on the software components. This short paper describes a new tool, called CONCERNLINES, that supports this cognitive process by visualizing co-occurring concerns over time.
How Tagging Helps Bridge The Gap Between Social And Technical Aspects In Software Development, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey
How Tagging Helps Bridge The Gap Between Social And Technical Aspects In Software Development, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Empirical research on collaborative software development practices indicates that technical and social aspects of software development are often intertwined. The processes followed are tacit and constantly evolving, thus not all of them are amenable to formal tool support. In this paper, we explore how ldquotaggingrdquo, a lightweight social computing mechanism, is used to bridge the gap between technical and social aspects of managing work items. We present the results from an empirical study on how tagging has been adopted and adapted over the past two years of a large project with 175 developers. Our research shows that the tagging mechanism …