A framework for automatic text-to-flowchart conversion: A novel teaching aid for novice programmers

From the time of early exploration in the area of programming languages, many tools have been employed to introduce novice programmers to programming. The most common tools entail flowchart-based notation as well as programming environments based on icons. More research in this field has revealed that the lack of problem-solving skills, which is considered as one of the prominent shortcomings that novices deal with, is exacerbated by language syntax that the novices employ. Thus, our proposed novel text-to-flowchart conversion approach intend to prompt novices to focus on solution rather than on programming syntax by engaging them in meaningful planning activities and solution designing prior to their attempt to do an implementation. The main target group of the research is CS minors students who do not know anything about programming before using the proposed framework. Therefore, only simple basic algorithmic programming problems designed for novice programmers are only considered as an input. One of the significant features applied in the system is to use automatic text-to-flowchart conversion. The main objective of this research is to develop a framework to improve the solution designing and problem-solving skills in novice programmers for both sighted and blind users. A knowledge base and lexical resources are used to draw its corresponding flowchart as well as a dialogue-based tutoring system, which gets novices involved in a dialogue with asking them to complete the corresponding flowchart or tracing the finalized flowchart. A crawler to search for the unknown programming problems entered by users through the Internet in order to improve the first knowledge base is also improvised to assure that the system automatically fortifies its knowledge base system. The initial evaluation of this framework has been done by 7 experts from Malaysia and Australia and very promising result has been shown.