Write a Line: Tests with Answer Templates and String Completion Hints for Self-Learning in a CS1 Course

One of the important tasks in learning programming is writing a line of code performing the necessary action. This allows students to practice skills in a playground with instant feedback before writing more complex programs and increases their proficiency when solving programming problems. However, answers in the form of program code have high variability. Among the possible approaches to grading and providing feedback, we chose template matching. This paper reports the results of using regular-expression-based questions with string completion hints in a CS1 course for 4 years with 497 students. The evaluation results show that Perl-compatible regular expressions provide good precision and recall (more than 99%) when used for questions requiring writing a single line of code while being able to provide string-completion feedback regardless of how wrong the initial student’s answer is. After introducing formative quizzes with string-completion hints to the course, the number of questions that teachers and teaching assistants received about questions in the formative quizzes dropped considerably: most of the training question attempts resulted in finding the correct answer without help from the teaching staff. However, some of the students use formative quizzes just to learn correct answers without actually trying to answer the questions.