A Study of Code Modification Problems for Excel Operations in Python Programming Learning Assistant System

Python programming has gained popularity in various fields due to rich libraries and short coding features. We have developed Programming Learning Assistant System (PLAS) for self-study of Python Programming. Previously, we presented Code Modification Problem (CMP) for studying data visualization operations for data analysis. A CMP instance consists of one source code and two images. One image represents the output of the code, and the other is the output of the answer code from a student and it should be obtained by modifying the given code. The correctness of any answer is verified through string matching with the correct one. In this paper, we present CMP for Excel operations by extending previous works. A hint function is implemented for each CMP instance to assist learners in solving it. We generated 25 CMP instances using Python codes for various Excel operations using pandas and confirmed the validity from the application results to students in Okayama University.