Implementations of Two Answer Submission Methods for Reducing Errors in Android Programming Learning Assistance System

Abstract

Recently, Android programming educations have become important in IT departments in universities due to the strong market demands. The Android Programming Learning Assistance System (APLAS) is a self-learning platform for Android programming. It provides assignments to students where the correctness of their answers can be checked automatically using unit testing tools through a web application. For each assignment in APLAS, students need to submit multiple files with the correct configuration as one project. However, many students cause errors in the current implementation of submitting one by one the files in the Android project made using Android Studio. In this paper, we implement two submission methods for reducing errors in APLAS. The zip-file method makes the zipped file of the Android project to be submitted. The GitHub-link method synchronizes the files in the Android project through the URL of the GitHub project. For evaluations, we asked 40 students to solve three assignments in APLAS and submit the answer files by freely choosing one method. The results show that the zip-file method was most popular and the GitHub-link method produced least errors.