An interactive program advising system

This paper describes components of an Interactive Program Advising System (IPAS) for beginning programming students. The system, being unaware of the algorithm being implemented by the student, is unable to direct the student toward writing a correct program. It instead comments on the programming constructs the student has used in the specific implementing language—in this case FORTRAN. Beginning programming students often write poorly structured programs (especially in a non-block-structured language like FORTRAN) with constructs which, while legal, indicate that the student doesn't really understand the operation being performed. Data is currently being collected on “conceptual errors” commonly made by beginning students. This paper describes some of these “errors” and what comments can be presented to the student to help him understand and correct his own “errors.” A subsequent paper will present statistics on frequency of errors and plausible student logic which would produce the errors.

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