Development of a Educational System that generates domain-oriented - explanations of Programs

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In this research, we have developed an educational system that helps programming learners by providing domain-oriented-explanations. Domain-oriented-explanations are explanations of functions of programs by vocabularies of domain world.We think that novice programming learners feel difficulties when they cannot understand whether bugs of their own program caused by failure in constructing algorithm or failure in encoding it. Therefore our system explains domain-oriented-functions of programs independently of detailed logic of the programs. By comparing explanations with supposed behaviors of the programs, learners can check algorithms and find algorithmic bugs without middling with detailed logic of the programs. The system also shows sets of statements that realize each domain-oriented-function in order to help learners to find buggy codes. Moreover it can help learners to understand model programs by explaining them. In this research, we have proposed a method of program analysis based on simulation. Our system has a domain model which represents states of a domain world and simulates a program on the model to extract its domain-oriented-functions. We have also proposed a method to make explanations of extracted functions and logic of programs. We have implemented an experimental system and some domain models and have evaluated our methods. We think that a new type of educational system for programming can be proposed in this research.