Using Software Reasoning to Determine Domain-law Violations and Provide Explanatory Feedback: Expressions Tutor Example

Oleg Sychev, Nikita Penskoy, Grigory Terekhov

2022

Abstract

Introducing students to a new subject domain involves getting them acquainted with many new concepts. Some of these students need a trial-and-error process to learn these concepts, but it is time-consuming for teachers. An intelligent tutor capable of detecting domain-law violations and providing explanatory feedback can allow training until learning without supervision. This is especially important when teaching software engineering because it requires learning a lot of new concepts and has well-defined laws. Our goal was to develop a tutor capable to explain to the student the cause of their errors: the subject-domain laws that they violated. We present an approach to modeling subject-domain concepts and laws that allows finding correct answers and determining law violations in students’ answers. A web-based tool for learning the order of evaluation for programming-language expressions was developed to assess the viability of this approach. The experiments show that Apache Jena and Clingo inference engines work quickly enough to find domain-law violations after each error in middle-sized tasks. The developed tool was evaluated by volunteer undergraduate students and received positive feedback. After the initial evaluation, the tool was used in the learning process; the students’ learning gains after using the system were statistically significant.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Sychev O., Penskoy N. and Terekhov G. (2022). Using Software Reasoning to Determine Domain-law Violations and Provide Explanatory Feedback: Expressions Tutor Example. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-758-562-3, pages 116-123. DOI: 10.5220/0011070100003182

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu22,
author={Oleg Sychev and Nikita Penskoy and Grigory Terekhov},
title={Using Software Reasoning to Determine Domain-law Violations and Provide Explanatory Feedback: Expressions Tutor Example},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,},
year={2022},
pages={116-123},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011070100003182},
isbn={978-989-758-562-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,
TI - Using Software Reasoning to Determine Domain-law Violations and Provide Explanatory Feedback: Expressions Tutor Example
SN - 978-989-758-562-3
AU - Sychev O.
AU - Penskoy N.
AU - Terekhov G.
PY - 2022
SP - 116
EP - 123
DO - 10.5220/0011070100003182