Converting Java Source Code for Programming Education Support Tool pgtracer

Abstract

We have proposed a programming education support tool pgtracer for effective programming education. Pgtracer utilizes source codes and trace tables that represent execution results of the source code and creates programming exercises by defining blanks in some of them. The difficulty level of the exercises can be freely adjusted since the fill-in-the-blanks in the programs and trace tables can be defined freely. Furthermore, we can realize learning analytics by collecting the data of students' response process. In this paper, we extend pgtracer to incorporate Java for the effective education of object-oriented programming. We convert Java programs into an XML format that can be processed by pgtracer to effectively teach object-oriented programming using Java. By expressing the source code in XML format, it becomes possible to create flexible fill-in-the-blank questions. For this purpose, we utilize JavaCC to create an XML generator, which implements a program for each syntactic rule of the Java grammar to convert the source code into the specified XML format. The XML generator is implemented by combining these programs.