An Implementation of Answer Code Validation Program for Code Writing Problem in Java Programming Learning Assistant System

To assist Java programming learning of novice students, we have developed the web-based Java Programming Learning Assistant System (JPLAS). It provides various exercise problems to cultivate code reading and code writing skills to support studies at various levels. The code writing problem (CWP) asks a student to write a source code to pass the given test code where the correctness is verified by running them on JUnit. Previously, we implemented the answer platform for students to solve CWP assignments with the automatic runs. However, the teacher needs to manually run them one by one to verify a lot of source codes from students. In this paper, we implement the answer code validation program that automatically verifies all the source codes for one test code and reports the number of tests that each code passed with the CSV file. For evaluations, we applied the program to a total of 999 source codes from 12-43 students for a total of 45 test codes that were assigned in the Java programming course in Okayama university, including for final examinations. The application results confirm the validity and effectiveness of the proposal.