The document describes a Flowchart-based Programming Environment (FPE) developed to improve problem solving skills for novice computer science students. FPE uses an automatic text-to-flowchart conversion approach to convert a programming problem stated in English text into a corresponding flowchart without human intervention. This allows students to focus on designing solutions in the form of flowcharts rather than programming syntax. The system was evaluated positively by 50 undergraduate students. Results suggest further developing FPE's text-to-flowchart conversion using a multi-agent system could make early programming learning more encouraging for students.
Teaching Programming to Non-Programmers at Undergraduate LevelDr. Amarjeet Singh
This paper focuses on solving the problems faced by
non-IT (Information Technology) background students at
undergraduate level in learning programming language who
are at the same time non-native English language speakers. In
this regard a step by step methodology has been proposed
here which try to take into account the difficulties faced by
this particular niche of programmers and counteract them
with possible solutions. Following this approach may help
lower the problems faced by the non-IT background students
to some extent and fulfill their aim in being professional or
conversational or end- user programmers according to their
career choices.
INVESTIGATION OF ATTITUDES TOWARDS COMPUTER PROGRAMMING IN TERMS OF VARIOUS V...ijpla
Java Language becomes the most common Object-Oriented Programming Language over the entire world. Students from Computer Sciences and Information Technology are struggling to lean Java concepts and programs on Java. That is because of the various difficulties in understanding Object Oriented concepts especially by novice programmers. This research adopts the design of interactive animation tool named LearnOOP which includes an animated visual model that shows the role of an object within a Java program. The visual object reflects the attributes and behaviour of that object to enhance students’ understanding. The interaction between the developed tool and students is conducted and the usability is measured using a questionnaire. The results show that the developed tool is more effective than using traditional teaching and positively impact learning. The results also have confirmed that LearnOOP tool is promising with respect to quality assurance, effectiveness and usability.
A Learning Setting Based on Competitions for Agile Software Engineeringdcsunu
In learning, competitions are used for years in applications of robotics because of the increased learning efficiency. Likewise, competitions can be used as learning catalyzers in software engineering. In this work, a graduate-level course in software engineering is flourished with a learning setting based on competitions. The course relies on teaching agile software engineering methodologies. A project is implemented using an agile methodology because of the preparation of the students to the real world. From the software engineering point of view, software development should be learned by the students by experiencing the entire development life cycle. From the business point of view, the students should learn to take roles in software development by experiencing teamwork and collaboration, and they should be ready for the software development issues of real life. Competition-based learning supports these two points of view by increasing teamwork, creating self-motivation, and by simulating today’s fast-changing environments. In short, learning efficiency is increased for a course of agile software engineering using a competition-based learning setting by adapting a problem from mathematics.
Software Engineering education and teachingSomya Jain
These slides emphasize on teaching the course on Software Engineering through various teaching approaches to make a positive impact on learning which has now
got reduced to monotonous lecturing.
Software Engineering Education and TeachingSomya Jain
These slides emphasize on teaching the course on Software Engineering through different teaching approaches to make a positive impact on learning which has now got reduced to monotonous lecturing.
Teaching Programming to Non-Programmers at Undergraduate LevelDr. Amarjeet Singh
This paper focuses on solving the problems faced by
non-IT (Information Technology) background students at
undergraduate level in learning programming language who
are at the same time non-native English language speakers. In
this regard a step by step methodology has been proposed
here which try to take into account the difficulties faced by
this particular niche of programmers and counteract them
with possible solutions. Following this approach may help
lower the problems faced by the non-IT background students
to some extent and fulfill their aim in being professional or
conversational or end- user programmers according to their
career choices.
INVESTIGATION OF ATTITUDES TOWARDS COMPUTER PROGRAMMING IN TERMS OF VARIOUS V...ijpla
Java Language becomes the most common Object-Oriented Programming Language over the entire world. Students from Computer Sciences and Information Technology are struggling to lean Java concepts and programs on Java. That is because of the various difficulties in understanding Object Oriented concepts especially by novice programmers. This research adopts the design of interactive animation tool named LearnOOP which includes an animated visual model that shows the role of an object within a Java program. The visual object reflects the attributes and behaviour of that object to enhance students’ understanding. The interaction between the developed tool and students is conducted and the usability is measured using a questionnaire. The results show that the developed tool is more effective than using traditional teaching and positively impact learning. The results also have confirmed that LearnOOP tool is promising with respect to quality assurance, effectiveness and usability.
A Learning Setting Based on Competitions for Agile Software Engineeringdcsunu
In learning, competitions are used for years in applications of robotics because of the increased learning efficiency. Likewise, competitions can be used as learning catalyzers in software engineering. In this work, a graduate-level course in software engineering is flourished with a learning setting based on competitions. The course relies on teaching agile software engineering methodologies. A project is implemented using an agile methodology because of the preparation of the students to the real world. From the software engineering point of view, software development should be learned by the students by experiencing the entire development life cycle. From the business point of view, the students should learn to take roles in software development by experiencing teamwork and collaboration, and they should be ready for the software development issues of real life. Competition-based learning supports these two points of view by increasing teamwork, creating self-motivation, and by simulating today’s fast-changing environments. In short, learning efficiency is increased for a course of agile software engineering using a competition-based learning setting by adapting a problem from mathematics.
Software Engineering education and teachingSomya Jain
These slides emphasize on teaching the course on Software Engineering through various teaching approaches to make a positive impact on learning which has now
got reduced to monotonous lecturing.
Software Engineering Education and TeachingSomya Jain
These slides emphasize on teaching the course on Software Engineering through different teaching approaches to make a positive impact on learning which has now got reduced to monotonous lecturing.
Analysis of the learning object-oriented programming factors IJECEIAES
Students often feel overwhelmed by object-oriented programming courses. They find it difficult and complex to learn, requiring a high cognitive load to use the concepts in coding. These issues lead to demotivation in learning programming. This research aims to identify and verify factors that contribute to learning object-oriented programming from two perspectives: interviews and surveys. A literature review was conducted to identify these factors, followed by interviews with five experts who have been teaching object-oriented programming for over ten years to confirm them. Based on the interview results, a questionnaire was developed and administered to 31 bachelor students and 19 lecturers with master’s or doctorate degrees in computer science. The responses indicated that the identified factors were acceptable, with scores ranging from 3.74 to 4.65. The outcomes of this study are a set of factors that should be considered in a programming environment to improve the teaching and learning of object-oriented programming and make it more accessible and engaging for students.
A hybrid composite features based sentence level sentiment analyzerIAESIJAI
Current lexica and machine learning based sentiment analysis approaches
still suffer from a two-fold limitation. First, manual lexicon construction and
machine training is time consuming and error-prone. Second, the
prediction’s accuracy entails sentences and their corresponding training text
should fall under the same domain. In this article, we experimentally
evaluate four sentiment classifiers, namely support vector machines (SVMs),
Naive Bayes (NB), logistic regression (LR) and random forest (RF). We
quantify the quality of each of these models using three real-world datasets
that comprise 50,000 movie reviews, 10,662 sentences, and 300 generic
movie reviews. Specifically, we study the impact of a variety of natural
language processing (NLP) pipelines on the quality of the predicted
sentiment orientations. Additionally, we measure the impact of incorporating
lexical semantic knowledge captured by WordNet on expanding original
words in sentences. Findings demonstrate that the utilizing different NLP
pipelines and semantic relationships impacts the quality of the sentiment
analyzers. In particular, results indicate that coupling lemmatization and
knowledge-based n-gram features proved to produce higher accuracy results.
With this coupling, the accuracy of the SVM classifier has improved to
90.43%, while it was 86.83%, 90.11%, 86.20%, respectively using the three
other classifiers.
Hi! Take a look at this article with the best capstone project final report sample. For more visit site https://www.capstoneproject.net/capstone-project-final-report/
Authoring system of drill & practice elearning modules for hearing impaired s...ijcsit
Hearing Impaired (HI) persons need to keep on practicing and repeating their lessons as well as their exercises. Teaching methodology of HI students differ than normal students. HI students need to be involved in practicing more and more using their modes of visual communication like sign language to cover their audio disability. Teaching methodology of HI students recommends demonstration and repeating with slow presentations of instructional material. A teacher displays his lesson directly face to
face without visual noise. More reinforcement and encouragement to HI students , fun & enjoyment should
be strongly included in the e-lessons as well as continuous interaction between teacher and HI students. As
per previous factors the decision of researchers is to develop Drill & Practice (D&P) e-learning modules(eLMs) for selected topics like Mathematics. D&P eLMs of Mathematics for HI persons would be the case study of this research including Developing & Evaluating.
The authors selected D&P eLMs Because eLMs match the requirements and mechanism of teaching methodology for HI students.
The mechanism of developing eLMs is represented by Developing an Authoring System which allows teachers of HI persons to generate any eLM of any selected topic for HI students. Also they can generate multiple eLMs in the project.
The evaluating producer & tools for the experimental eLMs were view points of Experts through openQuestionnaire to list their evaluating comments. Besides view points of experts. There are experiments which were held in real environment of HI students to test the eLMs of D&P of Mathematics to get valuable feedback from them.
French machine reading for question answeringAli Kabbadj
This paper proposes to unlock the main barrier to machine reading and comprehension French natural language texts. This open the way to machine to find to a question a precise answer buried in the mass of unstructured French texts. Or to create a universal French chatbot. Deep learning has produced extremely promising results for various tasks in natural language understanding particularly topic classification, sentiment analysis, question answering, and language translation. But to be effective Deep Learning methods need very large training da-tasets. Until now these technics cannot be actually used for French texts Question Answering (Q&A) applications since there was not a large Q&A training dataset. We produced a large (100 000+) French training Dataset for Q&A by translating and adapting the English SQuAD v1.1 Dataset, a GloVe French word and character embed-ding vectors from Wikipedia French Dump. We trained and evaluated of three different Q&A neural network ar-chitectures in French and carried out a French Q&A models with F1 score around 70%.
Deep learning based Arabic short answer grading in serious gamesIJECEIAES
Automatic short answer grading (ASAG) has become part of natural language processing problems. Modern ASAG systems start with natural language preprocessing and end with grading. Researchers started experimenting with machine learning in the preprocessing stage and deep learning techniques in automatic grading for English. However, little research is available on automatic grading for Arabic. Datasets are important to ASAG, and limited datasets are available in Arabic. In this research, we have collected a set of questions, answers, and associated grades in Arabic. We have made this dataset publicly available. We have extended to Arabic the solutions used for English ASAG. We have tested how automatic grading works on answers in Arabic provided by schoolchildren in 6th grade in the context of serious games. We found out those schoolchildren providing answers that are 5.6 words long on average. On such answers, deep learning-based grading has achieved high accuracy even with limited training data. We have tested three different recurrent neural networks for grading. With a transformer, we have achieved an accuracy of 95.67%. ASAG for school children will help detect children with learning problems early. When detected early, teachers can solve learning problems easily. This is the main purpose of this research.
Development of a Modular Unit of a Higher Level Framework or Tool for Basic P...TELKOMNIKA JOURNAL
This paper reports about the development of a modular unit of a higher level framework or tool whose intended objective is the creation of animated lessons for basic programming (CS1) course in computer science discipline with visual aids. The goal of such lessons is to address the difficulties faced by the novice programmers in CS1 course.This module here after referred to as ‘type writer’allows instructors to render programmes or code snippets in a live typing manner as opposed to their sudden or en-block placement on the presentation area like a Power Point Slide; a commonly used approach in the present day eLearning.This project is planned to be executed in two stages and ‘type writer’ is the outcome of the first stage. This would be combined with another two modules that are planned to be developed in the second stage, to make the complete tool. The entire tool would be developed in Action Script 3.0 language that works on Adobe Flash Platform.
E-Learning Student Assistance Model for the First Computer Programming CourseIJITE
E-Learning applied to computer programming course design is a promising area of research. The student having clear understanding of the programming constructs can apply it to solve various problems. Because of limited time and availability, the instructor can go back to some extent to cover the weaknesses of their students that hinder the understanding of the problems. As more lessons are covered, the weak students become weaker in programming. To cope up with these problems an e-learning system is devised which the student can use anywhere and at any time as a web application. It comprises of both tutoring and assessment and also provides guiding the students to error correction using back-tracking technique to refine the concepts and reattempt the programming problem.
E-LEARNING STUDENT ASSISTANCE MODEL FOR THE FIRST COMPUTER PROGRAMMING COURSE IJITE
E-Learning applied to computer programming course design is a promising area of research. The student
having clear understanding of the programming constructs can apply it to solve various problems. Because
of limited time and availability, the instructor can go back to some extent to cover the weaknesses of their
students that hinder the understanding of the problems. As more lessons are covered, the weak students
become weaker in programming. To cope up with these problems an e-learning system is devised which the
student can use anywhere and at any time as a web application. It comprises of both tutoring and
assessment and also provides guiding the students to error correction using back-tracking technique to
refine the concepts and reattempt the programming problem
E-Learning Student Assistance Model for the First Computer Programming CourseIJITE
E-Learning applied to computer programming course design is a promising area of research. The student
having clear understanding of the programming constructs can apply it to solve various problems. Because
of limited time and availability, the instructor can go back to some extent to cover the weaknesses of their
students that hinder the understanding of the problems. As more lessons are covered, the weak students
become weaker in programming. To cope up with these problems an e-learning system is devised which the
student can use anywhere and at any time as a web application. It comprises of both tutoring and
assessment and also provides guiding the students to error correction using back-tracking technique to
refine the concepts and reattempt the programming problem.
Java-centered Translator-based Multi-paradigm Software Development EnvironmentWaqas Tariq
This research explores the use of a translator-based multi-paradigm programming method to develop high quality software. With Java as the target language, an integrated software development environment is built to allow different parts of software implemented in Lisp, Prolog, and Java respectively. Two open source translators named PrologCafe and Linj are used to translate Prolog and Lisp program into Java classes. In the end, the generated Java classes are compiled and linked into one executable program. To demonstrate the functionalities of this integrated multi-paradigm environment, a calculator application is developed. Our study has demonstrated that a centralized translator-based multi-paradigm software development environment has great potential for improving software quality and the productivity of software developers. The key to the successful adoption of this approach in large software development depends on the compatibility among the translators and seamless integration of generated codes.
Analysis of the learning object-oriented programming factors IJECEIAES
Students often feel overwhelmed by object-oriented programming courses. They find it difficult and complex to learn, requiring a high cognitive load to use the concepts in coding. These issues lead to demotivation in learning programming. This research aims to identify and verify factors that contribute to learning object-oriented programming from two perspectives: interviews and surveys. A literature review was conducted to identify these factors, followed by interviews with five experts who have been teaching object-oriented programming for over ten years to confirm them. Based on the interview results, a questionnaire was developed and administered to 31 bachelor students and 19 lecturers with master’s or doctorate degrees in computer science. The responses indicated that the identified factors were acceptable, with scores ranging from 3.74 to 4.65. The outcomes of this study are a set of factors that should be considered in a programming environment to improve the teaching and learning of object-oriented programming and make it more accessible and engaging for students.
A hybrid composite features based sentence level sentiment analyzerIAESIJAI
Current lexica and machine learning based sentiment analysis approaches
still suffer from a two-fold limitation. First, manual lexicon construction and
machine training is time consuming and error-prone. Second, the
prediction’s accuracy entails sentences and their corresponding training text
should fall under the same domain. In this article, we experimentally
evaluate four sentiment classifiers, namely support vector machines (SVMs),
Naive Bayes (NB), logistic regression (LR) and random forest (RF). We
quantify the quality of each of these models using three real-world datasets
that comprise 50,000 movie reviews, 10,662 sentences, and 300 generic
movie reviews. Specifically, we study the impact of a variety of natural
language processing (NLP) pipelines on the quality of the predicted
sentiment orientations. Additionally, we measure the impact of incorporating
lexical semantic knowledge captured by WordNet on expanding original
words in sentences. Findings demonstrate that the utilizing different NLP
pipelines and semantic relationships impacts the quality of the sentiment
analyzers. In particular, results indicate that coupling lemmatization and
knowledge-based n-gram features proved to produce higher accuracy results.
With this coupling, the accuracy of the SVM classifier has improved to
90.43%, while it was 86.83%, 90.11%, 86.20%, respectively using the three
other classifiers.
Hi! Take a look at this article with the best capstone project final report sample. For more visit site https://www.capstoneproject.net/capstone-project-final-report/
Authoring system of drill & practice elearning modules for hearing impaired s...ijcsit
Hearing Impaired (HI) persons need to keep on practicing and repeating their lessons as well as their exercises. Teaching methodology of HI students differ than normal students. HI students need to be involved in practicing more and more using their modes of visual communication like sign language to cover their audio disability. Teaching methodology of HI students recommends demonstration and repeating with slow presentations of instructional material. A teacher displays his lesson directly face to
face without visual noise. More reinforcement and encouragement to HI students , fun & enjoyment should
be strongly included in the e-lessons as well as continuous interaction between teacher and HI students. As
per previous factors the decision of researchers is to develop Drill & Practice (D&P) e-learning modules(eLMs) for selected topics like Mathematics. D&P eLMs of Mathematics for HI persons would be the case study of this research including Developing & Evaluating.
The authors selected D&P eLMs Because eLMs match the requirements and mechanism of teaching methodology for HI students.
The mechanism of developing eLMs is represented by Developing an Authoring System which allows teachers of HI persons to generate any eLM of any selected topic for HI students. Also they can generate multiple eLMs in the project.
The evaluating producer & tools for the experimental eLMs were view points of Experts through openQuestionnaire to list their evaluating comments. Besides view points of experts. There are experiments which were held in real environment of HI students to test the eLMs of D&P of Mathematics to get valuable feedback from them.
French machine reading for question answeringAli Kabbadj
This paper proposes to unlock the main barrier to machine reading and comprehension French natural language texts. This open the way to machine to find to a question a precise answer buried in the mass of unstructured French texts. Or to create a universal French chatbot. Deep learning has produced extremely promising results for various tasks in natural language understanding particularly topic classification, sentiment analysis, question answering, and language translation. But to be effective Deep Learning methods need very large training da-tasets. Until now these technics cannot be actually used for French texts Question Answering (Q&A) applications since there was not a large Q&A training dataset. We produced a large (100 000+) French training Dataset for Q&A by translating and adapting the English SQuAD v1.1 Dataset, a GloVe French word and character embed-ding vectors from Wikipedia French Dump. We trained and evaluated of three different Q&A neural network ar-chitectures in French and carried out a French Q&A models with F1 score around 70%.
Deep learning based Arabic short answer grading in serious gamesIJECEIAES
Automatic short answer grading (ASAG) has become part of natural language processing problems. Modern ASAG systems start with natural language preprocessing and end with grading. Researchers started experimenting with machine learning in the preprocessing stage and deep learning techniques in automatic grading for English. However, little research is available on automatic grading for Arabic. Datasets are important to ASAG, and limited datasets are available in Arabic. In this research, we have collected a set of questions, answers, and associated grades in Arabic. We have made this dataset publicly available. We have extended to Arabic the solutions used for English ASAG. We have tested how automatic grading works on answers in Arabic provided by schoolchildren in 6th grade in the context of serious games. We found out those schoolchildren providing answers that are 5.6 words long on average. On such answers, deep learning-based grading has achieved high accuracy even with limited training data. We have tested three different recurrent neural networks for grading. With a transformer, we have achieved an accuracy of 95.67%. ASAG for school children will help detect children with learning problems early. When detected early, teachers can solve learning problems easily. This is the main purpose of this research.
Development of a Modular Unit of a Higher Level Framework or Tool for Basic P...TELKOMNIKA JOURNAL
This paper reports about the development of a modular unit of a higher level framework or tool whose intended objective is the creation of animated lessons for basic programming (CS1) course in computer science discipline with visual aids. The goal of such lessons is to address the difficulties faced by the novice programmers in CS1 course.This module here after referred to as ‘type writer’allows instructors to render programmes or code snippets in a live typing manner as opposed to their sudden or en-block placement on the presentation area like a Power Point Slide; a commonly used approach in the present day eLearning.This project is planned to be executed in two stages and ‘type writer’ is the outcome of the first stage. This would be combined with another two modules that are planned to be developed in the second stage, to make the complete tool. The entire tool would be developed in Action Script 3.0 language that works on Adobe Flash Platform.
E-Learning Student Assistance Model for the First Computer Programming CourseIJITE
E-Learning applied to computer programming course design is a promising area of research. The student having clear understanding of the programming constructs can apply it to solve various problems. Because of limited time and availability, the instructor can go back to some extent to cover the weaknesses of their students that hinder the understanding of the problems. As more lessons are covered, the weak students become weaker in programming. To cope up with these problems an e-learning system is devised which the student can use anywhere and at any time as a web application. It comprises of both tutoring and assessment and also provides guiding the students to error correction using back-tracking technique to refine the concepts and reattempt the programming problem.
E-LEARNING STUDENT ASSISTANCE MODEL FOR THE FIRST COMPUTER PROGRAMMING COURSE IJITE
E-Learning applied to computer programming course design is a promising area of research. The student
having clear understanding of the programming constructs can apply it to solve various problems. Because
of limited time and availability, the instructor can go back to some extent to cover the weaknesses of their
students that hinder the understanding of the problems. As more lessons are covered, the weak students
become weaker in programming. To cope up with these problems an e-learning system is devised which the
student can use anywhere and at any time as a web application. It comprises of both tutoring and
assessment and also provides guiding the students to error correction using back-tracking technique to
refine the concepts and reattempt the programming problem
E-Learning Student Assistance Model for the First Computer Programming CourseIJITE
E-Learning applied to computer programming course design is a promising area of research. The student
having clear understanding of the programming constructs can apply it to solve various problems. Because
of limited time and availability, the instructor can go back to some extent to cover the weaknesses of their
students that hinder the understanding of the problems. As more lessons are covered, the weak students
become weaker in programming. To cope up with these problems an e-learning system is devised which the
student can use anywhere and at any time as a web application. It comprises of both tutoring and
assessment and also provides guiding the students to error correction using back-tracking technique to
refine the concepts and reattempt the programming problem.
Java-centered Translator-based Multi-paradigm Software Development EnvironmentWaqas Tariq
This research explores the use of a translator-based multi-paradigm programming method to develop high quality software. With Java as the target language, an integrated software development environment is built to allow different parts of software implemented in Lisp, Prolog, and Java respectively. Two open source translators named PrologCafe and Linj are used to translate Prolog and Lisp program into Java classes. In the end, the generated Java classes are compiled and linked into one executable program. To demonstrate the functionalities of this integrated multi-paradigm environment, a calculator application is developed. Our study has demonstrated that a centralized translator-based multi-paradigm software development environment has great potential for improving software quality and the productivity of software developers. The key to the successful adoption of this approach in large software development depends on the compatibility among the translators and seamless integration of generated codes.
Synthetic Fiber Construction in lab .pptxPavel ( NSTU)
Synthetic fiber production is a fascinating and complex field that blends chemistry, engineering, and environmental science. By understanding these aspects, students can gain a comprehensive view of synthetic fiber production, its impact on society and the environment, and the potential for future innovations. Synthetic fibers play a crucial role in modern society, impacting various aspects of daily life, industry, and the environment. ynthetic fibers are integral to modern life, offering a range of benefits from cost-effectiveness and versatility to innovative applications and performance characteristics. While they pose environmental challenges, ongoing research and development aim to create more sustainable and eco-friendly alternatives. Understanding the importance of synthetic fibers helps in appreciating their role in the economy, industry, and daily life, while also emphasizing the need for sustainable practices and innovation.
2024.06.01 Introducing a competency framework for languag learning materials ...Sandy Millin
http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/iateflwebinar2024
Published classroom materials form the basis of syllabuses, drive teacher professional development, and have a potentially huge influence on learners, teachers and education systems. All teachers also create their own materials, whether a few sentences on a blackboard, a highly-structured fully-realised online course, or anything in between. Despite this, the knowledge and skills needed to create effective language learning materials are rarely part of teacher training, and are mostly learnt by trial and error.
Knowledge and skills frameworks, generally called competency frameworks, for ELT teachers, trainers and managers have existed for a few years now. However, until I created one for my MA dissertation, there wasn’t one drawing together what we need to know and do to be able to effectively produce language learning materials.
This webinar will introduce you to my framework, highlighting the key competencies I identified from my research. It will also show how anybody involved in language teaching (any language, not just English!), teacher training, managing schools or developing language learning materials can benefit from using the framework.
June 3, 2024 Anti-Semitism Letter Sent to MIT President Kornbluth and MIT Cor...Levi Shapiro
Letter from the Congress of the United States regarding Anti-Semitism sent June 3rd to MIT President Sally Kornbluth, MIT Corp Chair, Mark Gorenberg
Dear Dr. Kornbluth and Mr. Gorenberg,
The US House of Representatives is deeply concerned by ongoing and pervasive acts of antisemitic
harassment and intimidation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Failing to act decisively to ensure a safe learning environment for all students would be a grave dereliction of your responsibilities as President of MIT and Chair of the MIT Corporation.
This Congress will not stand idly by and allow an environment hostile to Jewish students to persist. The House believes that your institution is in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and the inability or
unwillingness to rectify this violation through action requires accountability.
Postsecondary education is a unique opportunity for students to learn and have their ideas and beliefs challenged. However, universities receiving hundreds of millions of federal funds annually have denied
students that opportunity and have been hijacked to become venues for the promotion of terrorism, antisemitic harassment and intimidation, unlawful encampments, and in some cases, assaults and riots.
The House of Representatives will not countenance the use of federal funds to indoctrinate students into hateful, antisemitic, anti-American supporters of terrorism. Investigations into campus antisemitism by the Committee on Education and the Workforce and the Committee on Ways and Means have been expanded into a Congress-wide probe across all relevant jurisdictions to address this national crisis. The undersigned Committees will conduct oversight into the use of federal funds at MIT and its learning environment under authorities granted to each Committee.
• The Committee on Education and the Workforce has been investigating your institution since December 7, 2023. The Committee has broad jurisdiction over postsecondary education, including its compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, campus safety concerns over disruptions to the learning environment, and the awarding of federal student aid under the Higher Education Act.
• The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating the sources of funding and other support flowing to groups espousing pro-Hamas propaganda and engaged in antisemitic harassment and intimidation of students. The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is the principal oversight committee of the US House of Representatives and has broad authority to investigate “any matter” at “any time” under House Rule X.
• The Committee on Ways and Means has been investigating several universities since November 15, 2023, when the Committee held a hearing entitled From Ivory Towers to Dark Corners: Investigating the Nexus Between Antisemitism, Tax-Exempt Universities, and Terror Financing. The Committee followed the hearing with letters to those institutions on January 10, 202
Honest Reviews of Tim Han LMA Course Program.pptxtimhan337
Personal development courses are widely available today, with each one promising life-changing outcomes. Tim Han’s Life Mastery Achievers (LMA) Course has drawn a lot of interest. In addition to offering my frank assessment of Success Insider’s LMA Course, this piece examines the course’s effects via a variety of Tim Han LMA course reviews and Success Insider comments.
How to Make a Field invisible in Odoo 17Celine George
It is possible to hide or invisible some fields in odoo. Commonly using “invisible” attribute in the field definition to invisible the fields. This slide will show how to make a field invisible in odoo 17.
2. 630
Hooshyar et al. 2015
Asia Life Sciences 24(2) 2015
INTRODUCTION
Computer science and engineering students are required to be able to do
programming, as there are several programming courses in these fields that require
programming skills (McCracken et al. 2001). As indicated in literature, there are
high dropout and failure rates in initial programming courses. Carter and Jenkins
(1999) stated that many students avoid programming in their final year projects
on the grounds of either not being able to program or believing they cannot. Lack
of problem-solving skills, solution designing and use of programming languages
that are often artificial for many students is a reason why learning programming
is more difficult (Moser 1997, Pillay 2003, Pillay & Jugoo 2005). However, it
should be mentioned that students’ science background and motivation, class size
and programming language syntax are other, most often highlighted reasons.
Commonly, the majority of students understand the basic programming constructs
but are not able to apply them for creating programs to solve problems. Due to the
aforementioned reason, it is believed that to compose and coordinate instruction for
creating the components of a program is the major problem of countless students
(Mayer 1981, Spohrer & Soloway 1985). In our view, programming languages are
only a way of expressing solutions while more priority and attention should be
given to problem-solving abilities, because basically, learning to solve problems
algorithmically contributes to learning to program. Due to the fact that programming
skills cannot be absolutely transferred from instructors to students, novices should
also actively practice programming to gain knowledge (Boada et al. 2004, Ben-Ari
2001). Although, most students face various difficulties in the preliminary learning
stages and are unable to develop solutions for simple problems. This might make
them give up trying and lose interest, which leads to dropout and failure. Several
programming tools have been developed which instead of focusing on problem
solving skills, which are more essential for weaker students, those tools stress more
on programming language features. With the hope of solving this difficulty, we
developed our flowchart-based programming environment that benefits from an
automatic text-to-flowchart conversion approach to enable creating initial solutions
for simple problems and to improve problem-solving skills. Natural Language
Processing (NLP), Knowledge Base System, Knowledge Expansion, and a Web
Crawler (web monitoring service) are Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques applied
in our proposed system so as to convert the statement of a given programming
problem, here in English, to a relevant flowchart. A Flowchart-based Programming
Environment (FPE) tool also contains an online chat and databases improvement
process, using web crawler, without human intervention as well as visualization-
based approach to support weaker students in creating basic algorithms. Three
databases are improvised in the system which the first one contains main
programming keywords, the second one used as a dictionary to find synonym and
substitution of extracted keyword, and the third one for storing unknown keyword
entered by users. An interesting approach has been also utilized in FPE which
enables it to even generate the flowchart for the programming problem having no
keywords in their statement. The rationale behind the development of FPE is to
help students understand the relation between the problem statement exercise, in
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English text here, and its relevant flowchart in order to create an initial solution
that can subsequently be improved. Using FPE, the students are guided through
a dialogue system chat. This interaction urges students to construct solutions step
by step. Novice programmers who have no prior knowledge of programming are
the target audience of this research. The main contribution of this work is a novel
flowchart-based programming environment benefiting from an automatic text-
to-flowchart conversion approach for improving problem-solving skills of novice
programmers in a form of solution designing activities. The remaining parts of this
paper are dedicated to the following sections: mental model and visualization, the
proposed system architecture, evaluation and participants, results and discussion,
conclusions and future work.
RELATED WORKS
Inanattempttopresentprogramminganditsintroductorycoursestobeginners,
iconic based programming and flowchart based notation environments are highly
applicable. These environments assist in providing a precise and accurate mental
model in addition to providing a conceptual understanding of the vital subjects and
their execution, and in a way enhancing the problem-solving abilities of the novice
programmers (Moghaddam et al. 2013). However, the majority of flowchart-based
programming environments emphasized on flowcharts and the generated code but
none has concentrated on automatically converting a given problem, i.e. the English
text, to its corresponding flowchart without human intervention. This means that
by filling this gap, not only can the problem-solving skills of novice programmers
be improved, but also a complete software agent tool can be developed which can
replace the role of a programming tutor in the real world for novice programmers,
since the process from building a flowchart until coding, debugging, tracing, etc.
have already been developed (Hooshyar et al. 2013). This study tries to discover an
automatic approach of drawing a flowchart that has been described by those texts
(Hooshyar et al. 2014). Currently, very few studies have been done on this subject
matter, using keyword matching technique and they are not aimed at improving
problem-solving of novice programmers and they are commercial. Although, there
have been some attempts such as in LIM-G (Wong et al. 2007), ALBERT (Oberem
1987) and FREEBODY (Oberem et al. 1993) in addition to a few other studies
(Koedinger & Sueker 1996, Looi & Tan 1998, Steele & Steele 1999, Wheeler &
Regian 1999, Chang et al. 2005, Mukherjee & Garain 2005). LIM-G and ALBERT
applied strong NLP (Natural Language Processing) approaches and a restricted
knowledge base in order to understand the significant types of school-level
mensuration and the problems of physics corresponding to a textual demonstration
and offered solutions along with the illustrative diagrams. FREEBODY, although
is an adaptation of ALBERT, is a specific software that is able to understand a
free body diagram that has been drawn by a beginner and guides the learner to
making any corrections. Another system which was developed by Mukherjee,
Garain and Biswas (2013) named “Automatic Text-to-Diagram Conversion: a Novel
Teaching Aid for the Blind People”, along with the systems developed by ALBERT
and LIM-G, are somewhat similar to our proposed system. FPE is able to convert
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text-to-flowchart automatically which simulates human technique of resolving a
programming problem as well as providing novices with an online system chat to
address their issues during solution designing. The system utilizes an accessible
knowledge base source, dialogue-based tutoring system, and innovative intelligent
demonstration schemes which are built from various fields such as knowledge
presentation, automated reasoning, natural language processing, query expansion,
and dialogue-based systems.
THE PROPOSED SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
The FPE architecture is shown in Figure 1. The proposed system supports
teaching computer programming to novice programmers. The primary purposes of
this system are to support the problem-solving ability through designing activities
as well as to show the importance of highlighting the essential principles of various
algorithms on a higher level of abstraction.
Figure 1. The architecture of flowchart-based programming environment (FPE).
At this section we focus on the first component, automatic text-to-flowchart
conversion, which consists of five main sub-components namely text processing,
knowledge-based, query expansion, dialogue-based tutoring system, and a crawler.
Firstly, the semantic and syntactic analysis of entered programming problem in
English text is performed by Natural Language Processing (NLP) parser module in
order to extract keywords out of the textual description. Secondly, a knowledge base
is applied in the parser, named D1 containing general programming information
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about all of possible programming problem inputs and programming meaning
of the keywords to summarize useful information extracted from the problem.
Thirdly, another knowledge base with the name of D2 is applied to expand the
query by synonyms words and substitutions’ verbs. Fourthly, a dialogue-based
tutoring system is applied to interact with novice programmers and make necessary
online guidance to trace the finalized flowchart with the aim of improving solution
designing and problem solving skills. Last but not the least, a web crawler is
tasked to automatically search the Internet for the new and unknown programming
keywords and problems stored in D3 and add the relevant extracted information
from the Internet to D1. It is also should be noted that during the engagement of the
system with novices using dialogue-based tutoring system, they will be provided
with appropriate online feedbacks once the flowchart is being completed. Besides,
several pre-defined questions will be asked from users, using online system chat,
before and after completing the flowchart. The main purpose of this module is to
improve problem-solving skills as well as to support solution designing and design
activities. Therefore, by using dialogue-based tutoring system, novice programmers
are asked to identify the solution of a given problem, in English text, in a shape of
text-to-flowchart conversion along with finding the best possible way to complete
and trace the flowchart. It is also should be noted that unlike many other systems,
this framework has two parsers in order to simulate the logical and knowledge-
based human approach. The first one is applied to analyze the text and to extract
useful words out of textual description in order to produce language-free technical
summary, while the second one employs the produced technical summaries for
further processing and acting on the intermediate representation of the given
programming problem maintained by D1 knowledge base. Graphical module
generates the needed diagrams by taking each line of the draw-able representation
as input. Finally, it invokes the line-draw, point-draw or circle-draw functions and
passes the relevant set of data (e.g. coordinate values) as arguments of the functions.
And then, by each function in one entity, the relevant result is called to generate
digital flowchart on the computer display. By the time that all the entities are drawn
consecutively, the whole flowchart takes shape.
DIFFERENT CATEGORIES OF A GIVEN PROBLEM
Typical problems having keywords. In this type of problem, namely the Factorial,
Fibonacci series, palindrome number, quadratic equation, and etc, the proposed
system will go through listed process in below:
Text processing including parsing the sentence, noise removal, and main
words separation.
Referring to domain-specific knowledge-base, D1, to extract keywords with
cross-checking of words with each other.
Extract the relevant information and equation, and to pass them to
representation module; and after generating flowchart or sub-flowchart on the
screen, the dialogue-based tutoring system start communicating with novices to
make sure they comprehend the solution of given problem with giving them some
options to trace the generated flowchart.
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Example 1. “Write a program to generate the Fibonacci series”. In this example,
after the text processing stage the output will be: to/TO generate/VB the/DT
Fibonacci/NN series/NNS.
At the second stage, it goes through D1 knowledge base to find keyword.
So, “Fibonacci” and “Fibonacci series” are recognized as keywords and their
respective information and equations will be passed to representation module.
The corresponding flowchart or sub-flowchart will be generated digitally and then
dialogue-based tutoring system starts questioning the novices to assure they fully
understand all solution designing stages, or it starts tracing the final flowchart in
order to show novices different steps of solution designing so as to improve their
problem-solving skills. The screenshot of FPE for example 1 is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Workspace provided by FPE along with generated lowchart and the full
lowchart from the Internet.
Typical problems having no keywords.In this type of problems, namely: “Write a
program to return largest element in a list”, “Write a program to enter your name
and convert to uppercase”, and etc. the developed system will follow the process
mentioned in below:
Text processing including parsing the sentence, noise removal and main words
separation.
Referring to domain-specific knowledge-base to extract keywords with cross-
checking of words with each other.
If no keyword is found, it would be passed to query expansion which affects
verbs.
After generating flowchart or sub-flowchart on the screen, the natural language
dialogue system starts communicating with novices to make sure they comprehend
the solution of given problem with asking them to trace the generated flowchart. It
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also should be noted that the system should be able to extract more keywords while
chatting with novices via dialogue-based tutoring system, and refer them back to
domain-specific knowledge base and query expansion to find more hints.
Example 2.“Write a program to find the largest among three numbers”. In this
example, after the text processing and noise removal stage the output will be:Find/
VB largest/JJS among/IN three/CD numbers/NNS.
In this example, once the tagged output words are entered, D2 recognizes
‘largest’ and extracts its synonyms such as ‘biggest’, ’max’, and ’maximum’ and
passes these three to D1. This means that keyword searching is started again with
the new words, for example ‘biggest’, ’max’, ’maximum’ and etc. By doing so, these
three are extracted as keywords. Then they are passed to the second parser to be
searched through the D1 knowledge base to extract more information for drawing
a flowchart. Information extracted from the keywords is passed to representation
module in order to plot the flowchart or sub-flowchart for novices.
Figure 3. Workspace provided by FPE along with generated lowchart and the full
lowchart from the Internet.
The worst case scenario. In this type of problem, namely: “Write a program in c to
accept sentence from user”, the system will go through following process in below:
Text processing including parsing the sentence, noise removal, and main
words separation
Referring to domain-specific knowledge-base to extract keywords with cross-
checking of words with each other
If no keyword is found, it would be passed to query expansion which affects
verbs
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If no verb is recognized to be substituted or replaced by its synonyms in order
to expand the query, the proper shapes would be assigned to the main verbs and
the rest of the nouns are entered into the shape in order to build a proper flowchart.
After generating flowchart or sub-flowchart on the screen, the natural
language dialogue system start communicating with novices to make sure they
comprehend the solution of given problem with asking them to complete the final
flowchart out of given guidance, sub-flowchart, as well as giving them some options
to trace the generated flowchart. It also should be noted that the system should
be able to extract more keywords while chatting with novices via dialogue-based
tutoring system, and refer them back to domain-specific knowledge base and query
expansion to find more hints. It is worth mentioning that an on-line chat with admin
is designed for this mode to assure novices realize the final process of conversion
and to assure their problem-solving and solution designing skills are improved as
already targeted.
Example 3.“Write a program that asks the user to type an integer and write _you
win_ if the value is between 56 and 78”.
In this example, after the text processing and noise removal stage the output
will be:
Asks/VBZ user/NN type/VB integer/NN write/VB _/VBG you/PRP win/VB _/
NNS if/IN value/NN is/VBZ between/IN 56/CD 78/CD
In this example, ‘asks’ is assigned to a rectangle automatically as it is a process,
‘write’ is assigned to a parallelogram as it is a output, and finally ‘if’ is assigned to a
diamond as it is a condition, the generated sub-flowchart by the system for example
3 is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Workspace provided by FPE along with the generated sub-lowchart
Evaluation and participants.
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Evaluation and Participants. The current study participants comprise 50 first-
year undergraduate students from the University of Malaya (UM), Malaysia. They
mostly had no prior experience and knowledge of programming. The study was
conducted over two consecutive weeks and the study duration for each day was two,
two-hour sessions. Our initial hypothesis was to use FPE to improve the problem
solving skills of participants while reducing the syntactical burden inherent in most
programming languages. In the first session, the participants were supposed to solve
three given programming problems after a presentation of traditional instruction. In
the second session, participants were introduced to FPE with a 30-minute lecture
and then were asked to solve three given exercises using FPE. The programming
problems selected for this study were simple and basic, and their complexity
increased from one to another. They were basically extracted from the repository of
final exam questions of the computer science and information technology faculty
at UM. The participants were asked to solve 2 simple programming problems in
order to be introduced to using FPE and a few programming concepts. Examples
of special cases were provided for clarification. Evaluations were conducted in an
informal setting by ten evaluators every two hours. The five approaches selected to
evaluate FPE were: (1) Test the participants’ problem solving improvement while
being exposed to FPE; 2) Observe the users’ engagement with FPE; (3) Observe the
participants’ attitude toward the usability and efficacy of FPE by providing them
with a questionnaire after being exposed to FPE; (4) Interview participants during
and after exposure to FPE regarding usability and efficacy, and (5) Monitor the
participants’ problem solving skills.
Instruments and data collection. In evaluating FPE two key factors were
considered. First, the usability of FPE was regarded as similar to any other
software applications. Jacob Nielsen (2003) indicated that the usability of
software applications is employed to assess how easy to use user interfaces are.
Regarding FPE usability, the feedback gained from evaluation was categorized in
five general areas, namely ease of use, error handling, enjoyment, reliability and
website-related questions. Secondly, in order to prove whether FPE is educationally
beneficial to novice programmers, system efficacy should be assessed which
is the most important factor. Four instruments were applied in conducting this
study to ensure more accurate results regarding FPE usability and efficacy were
obtained. Questionnaires, observation and interviews were applied to collect
feedback and assess the participants’ satisfaction with their learning experience
using FPE. Moreover, problem solving monitoring was used to assess participants’
improvement in problem solving abilities. The first three data gathering techniques
obtained mainly subjective data. However, the latter was used to gather objective
data, or quantitative data, regarding the effect of FPE on improving the problem
solving skills of novice programmers. Monitoring the task completion times and
number of solved problems in each session were two methods used to gather data
(Warnlulasooriya et al. 2007, Hearrington 2009).
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RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This research is aimed to generate feedback regarding FPE usability, efficacy
and problem-solving ability. Table 1 and Figure 8 present the questionnaire
data gathered from the study, mean, standard deviation, variance as well as the
description and frequency of responses. In order to combine the results of the
questionnaires using different scales, percentage terms are used to present the data.
The questionnaire is divided into two groups: usability and efficacy.
Table 1. Questionnaire Results.
No
Study
Aim
Evaluation Criteria Mean
Std.
Deviation
Variance
1 Usability This programming tool is enjoyable to use 3.9800 .55291 .306
2 Usability
This programming tool is easy to use and
understand (I can learn how to use the tool
within 5 minutes)
4.3600 .85141 .725
3 Usability
The tool performs its function in a correct
and eficient manner
4.3800 .63535 .404
4 Usability The tool is speedy and responsive 4.1000 .50508 .255
5 Usability
The use of color is beneicial (The design
of this tool is attractive)
4.1400 .72871 .531
6 Usability Launching the tool is easy 4.2800 .64015 .410
7 Usability
The user interface design is appropriate for
an inexperienced user
4.1200 .84853 .720
8 Usability
The animation helped me develop a
solution and understand how a program
works
4.3600 .74942 .562
9 Usability
I enjoyed solving the programming
problem using this tool
4.6400 .48487 .235
10 Usability
System chat and instant feedback are
helpful
4.4400 .70450 .496
11 Usability
The error messages are helpful to provide
guidance to correct my mistake
4.1400 .63920 .409
12 Usability
The programming problems given are at
the right dificulty level for me
4.0200 .86873 .755
13 Eficacy
The automatic text-to-lowchart approach
is helpful when I have no idea about the
solution
4.2600 .98582 .972
14 Eficacy
The lowchart visualization helped me
when developing a solution
4.5400 .50346 .253
15 Eficacy
I had few problems learning how to use
the tool to develop my solution
3.0200 .79514 .632
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16 Eficacy
The lowchart is useful for designing
computer programs and sharing ideas
4.6000 .49487 .245
17 Eficacy
I understand the relationship between
the lowchart and programming problem
statement after using the tool
4.5400 .64555 .417
18 Eficacy
The tool made the programming concept
easier to understand
4.2600 .69429 .482
19 Eficacy
I would recommend the tool to others who
want to learn programming
4.5400 .50346 .253
20 Eficacy
The tool enabled me to see a design
solution
4.4400 .73290 .537
21 Eficacy
The lowchart enabled me to understand
the solution being developed
4.6000 .49487 .245
22 Eficacy
I feel I have learnt some skills by using the
tool and solving the problems
4.1600 .68094 .464
23 Eficacy
The tool has positively inluenced my
interest in programming
3.9800 .95810 .918
24 Eficacy
The tool helped me understand how to
design a solution in programming
4.3000 .61445 .378
25 Eficacy
The tool helped me develop and improve
my solution designing and problem-
solving skills
4.3000 .76265 .582
26 Eficacy
The tool increased my understanding of
computer programming
4.2800 .57286 .328
27 Eficacy
The tool as a whole and its features helped
me overcome conceptual dificulties in
programming
4.3600 .69282 .480
28 Eficacy
The tool enables me to focus and improve
my problem solving skills
4.4400 .64397 .415
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Figure 8. Questionnaire data gathered from 50 participants.
Upon collecting the evaluation results, their reliability should be studied.
Many methods have been applied by various researchers to measure reliability
and we used Cronbach’s Alpha in this research. This method is normally used to
measure internal consistency and the range is between 0 and 1. It is said that as
long as α is close to 1, it is reliable (Cronbach 1951) but overall, this range should be
higher than 0.7 to prove reliability. The Cronbach’s alpha measure for the usability
and efficacy of questions shown in Table 2 are greater than 0.7, which indicates the
high reliability level of this research and implies sufficient internal consistencies
have been judged for a reliable measure.
Table 2. Reliability Statistics.
Factor Cronbach’s Alpha
Usability .947
Efficacy .972
Generally, the data collected indicates the positivity of the research. Figure
9 illustrates the main results for the samples as a whole and individually for each
factor, where bars show the average score assigned to each item.
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Figure 9. Results of students’ opinion about FPE.
The above diagram shows that participants liked learning with FPE and
they thought that FPE helped them enjoy problem-solving and solution designing
activities with ease of use. Other factors, such as web and online problem solving
tasks, overall efficacy, flowchart, animation, and error handling were indicated
highly positive by users. Most students reported high satisfaction with FPE. Table
3 provides additional details, the mean and standard deviation concerning various
factors. Regarding the efficacy of FPE in improving problem-solving skills, which
is considered the main goal of this research, the results indicate that the overall
system efficacy in problem-solving and solution designing activities was 4.60. This
signifies how successful FPE was in attaining the main aim of the research.
Table 3 Mean (M) and standard deviation (SD) for items about students’ opinion of
FPE.
Items Usability Eficacy M SD
Enjoyment * 3.9800 0.782
Ease of use * 4.3600 0.765
Reliability * 4.6400 0.870
Website and Online Problem Solving Tasks * 4.0200 0.910
Overall eficacy * 4.6000 1.028
Flowchart * 4.6400 1.037
Animation * 3.7600 0.980
Error handling * 4.3000 1.030
Analysis of the problems solving. In this section, problem solving activities along
with their efficacy are assessed. As indicated in previous sections, in order to
monitor participants’ problem solving activities, the improvement in the completion
time of 10 participants (Table 4), and the number of problems solved in each session
by 32 participants (Figure 10) were monitored and assessed. Once the learning
difficulties were tackled, the completion time decreased even though problem
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complexity increased. Regarding the number of problems solved per session, by
using the system the majority of participants were at least able to solve one or two of
the given programming problems. This shows the effectiveness of FPE in problem
solving activities. A few participants were unable to solve problems before using
FPE, but by using FPE their problem solving abilities enhanced and they solved at
least one problem per session. In general, the feedback and results collected from
problem solving monitoring indicate that the participants found FPE very effective
and enjoyable. It should also be mentioned that some participants responded with
a low positive. The time limitation made some of the participants spend less time
familiarizing with FPE. Other factors affecting the evaluation results were age and
gender, which should be investigated further.
In spite of the fact that the problems grew in complexity from one to the
next, the time completion rate results shown in Table 4 demonstrate a decline in
completion time with each successive problem. During problem solving monitoring,
there were four evaluators who were not able to complete problems a2 and a3.
However, by using FPE not only could they tackle this issue, but the time decrement
in completion time for problems b2 and b3 was a real surprise. This shows that FPE
and the problem solving activities had a very positive impact on the problem solving
skills of most evaluators.
Figure 10. Average number of problems completed per session.
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Table 4. Time completion rates of 10 participants in two different sessions.
Participant
No
Problem
a1
Problem
a2
Problem
a3
Problem
b1
Problem
b2
Problem
b3
1 2:45 min 2:20 min 3:00 min 2:40 min 2:10 min 3:00 min
2 3:10 min 3:00 min 1:55 min 2:10 min 2:45 min
3 1:50 min 2:30 min 2:40 min 1:55 min 2:50 min 2:30 min
4 2:00 min 2:20 min 2:50 min 2:00 min 1:50 min 2:00 min
5 4:00 min 2:30 min 2:40 min 2:30 min
6 1:30 min 2:40 min 3:00 min 1:10 min 1:30 min 1:40 min
7 2:10 min 1:50 min 2:00 min 2:00 min 2:10 min 2:10 min
8 2:40 min 2:50 min 2:30 min 1:40 min 1:55 min 2:15 min
9 2:00 min 3:10 min 1:20 min 1:55 min 1:55 min
10 2:30 min 2:00 min 2:30 min 2:00 min 2:00 min 2:20 min
Max 4:00 min 3:10 min 3:00 min 2:40 min 2:50 min 3:00 min
Min 1:50 min 1:50 min 2:00 min 1:10 min 1:30 min 1:40 min
Avg. Time 2:27 min 2:32 min 2:38 min 1:55 min 2:07 min 2:18 min
No 10 9 7 10 10 10
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
At present, in an attempt to introduce novices to programming and also
for introductory programming developments, iconic based environments and
flowchart-based notation are largely used to enhance their logical and critical
thinking skills (Barzegar et al. 2010). More research in this field has revealed
that the lack of problem-solving skills is exacerbated by language syntax that the
novices employ. This might result in giving up trying and losing interest, which
can lead to dropping out and higher failure rates. Thus, our proposed novel text-to-
flowchart conversion approach intends to simulate human mechanism of solving a
programming problem, stated in English, prompting novices to focus on solution
rather than on programming syntax by engaging them in meaningful planning
activities and solution designing so as to improve their problem solving skills. Two
knowledge base systems are applied to draw the corresponding flowchart as well as
a dialogue-based tutoring system, which gets novices involved in a dialogue and ask
them to complete the corresponding flowchart or tracing the finalized flowchart
with the aim of improving solution designing and problem solving skills. A Web
crawler is designed to automatically search the Internet for the new and unknown
programming problems entered by users and add the relevant extracted information
from the Internet to D1 knowledge base. The proposed approach applied in FPE is an
advance and improvement over many existing visual programming environments.
An E-learning environment that visualizes the solution construction for a
programming problem by automatically converting the given problem statement to
its relevant flowchart while engaging users in flowchart development, will provide
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novices with an accurate mental model of execution. Thus, the main aim of this
study is to support the problem-solving ability through designing activities. We
believe FPE was very successful because the criteria were designed carefully. The
system benefits from a mature repository of basic and fundamental programming
problems aimed at novice programmers along with a novel approach of automatic
text-to-flowchart conversion, which enables FPE to get novices involved in
flowchart development. There are not many developed visualization tools intended
for students with no prior knowledge of programming. Besides our system, a few
others have been developed, such as SICAS (Gomes & Mendes 2000) and RAPTOR
(Carlisle et al. 2005). They are similar to FPE in a sense that they provide students
with an environment for flowchart construction and visualization. However, the
novel approach applied in FPE distinguishes it from other related works. Novice
programmers who do not know anything about programming are sometimes unable
tousetheaforementionedtoolsastheyrequiresomesortofuserknowledgeregarding
the entered programming problems. FPE resolves this inconvenience using a web-
based environment to get users involved in flowchart development of the entered
programming problem. It is worth mentioning that even the worst case scenarios
are improvised in our proposed system in order to fully assist users, even in terms
of problems that are not stored in the main system repository. Additionally, FPE
automatically improves its repository using an extra database to store the unknown
entered programming problems along with web crawlers to enhance its main
database. FPE received very positive feedback from 50 first-year undergraduate
students taking their first introductory courses in programming, “Programming
1” at University of Malaya. Various evaluation methods showed that FPE could
improve the participants’ problem solving skills. The main contribution of this work
is a novel flowchart-based programming environment benefiting from an automatic
text-to-flowchart conversion approach for improving problem-solving skills of
novice programmers in a form of solution designing activities. FPE can be utilized
in many academic applications namely in problem solving, drawing diagrams, and
etc. as well as to make teaching programming subjects a more appealing option for
instructors. Consequently, the results suggested future, further development of a
text-to-flowchart conversion approach in the form of a Multi-Agent System (MAS)
in order to make the early stages of learning programming more encouraging for
students.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is inancially supported by the Postgraduate Research Grant (PPP) of
University of Malaya under the Project PG072-2014 A.
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