Automatic Generation of C Source Code for Novice Programming Education

To efficiently support novice programming learners feeling programming difficult, clarifying the cause of preventing programming understanding, and developing a new teaching method appropriate for their understanding degree would be necessary. The objective of this paper is to develop a learning support system with reading source codes. This paper also aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed system from the subjective viewpoint of learners. The developed system can automatically generate a source code of C programming language in which there is no particular meaning because the source codes as learning materials are generated randomly. The developed system was utilized in a programming lecture for novice programming learners. This paper obtained student responses from a questionnaire, after the students had completed one semester of the instruction in programming, and analyzed the data. From the analysis result, it turned out that different evaluation patterns existed depending on the learner's basic programming skill.