Low-Cost and Effective Student-Orientation Mastery Learning Simulator for Programming Course

The training method, one teacher teaches one student to solve his programming mistakes by using one computer, costs a little time. In this study, the low-cost and effective modeling, which the teacher integrates the common mistakes by students into the programming simulator, is presented. In programming course, the basic and common mistakes made by the students are first listed and then the teacher takes these mistakes as the course objective of mastery learning. For each course objective, the corresponding mistakes are randomly generated by the programming simulator. Hence, the students can generate the wrong source codes and then finish the exercises to fix all mistakes by themselves. The wrong source codes are quite different when the students perform the programming simulator. Therefore, the students need to realize the programming principle instead of memorize the answers. Experimental results show that the students indeed master to fix these mistakes which are corresponding to the objectives.