A Support Tool for Instructors to Better Understand How Students Work on Assignments in Small Classes

We propose a tool to help instructors check the validity of Java programming assignments in Eclipse. The tool obtains the status of assignments being worked on in the university computer room and on home computers. The tool compares the creation process of similar assignments submitted by students. The experiment results showed that 32% of the edits were made to the program code on the day of the laboratory session, and the remaining 68% of the edits were made in the university computer room around 6:00 p.m. on or after the laboratory session. We found that 0.8% of the submitted assignments were very similar to each other, and further analysis of the edit histories of these program codes revealed that we could infer a certain degree of reference relationship between the assignments based on the relationship between the time of editing and the number of times edited.