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Syntactic Generation of Practice Novice Programs in Python

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ICT Education (SACLA 2018)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 963))

Abstract

In the present day, computer programs are written in high level languages and parsed syntactically as part of a compilation process. These parsers are defined with context-free grammars (CFGs), a language recogniser for the respective programming language. Formal grammars in general are used for language recognition or generation. In this paper we present the automatic generation of procedural programs in Python using a CFG. We have defined CFG rules to model program templates and implemented these rules to produce infinitely many distinct practice programs in Python. Each generated program is designed to test a novice programmer’s knowledge of functions, expressions, loops, and/or conditional statements. The CFG rules are highly generic and can be extended to generate programs in other procedural languages. The resulting programs can be used as practice, test or examination problems in introductory programming courses. 500,000 iterations of generated programs can be found at: https://tinyurl.com/pythonprogramgenerator. A survey of 103 students’ perception showed that 93.1% strongly agreed that these programs can help them in practice and improve their programming skills.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Electives are courses not in the mainstream of the offered degree. An example is a student studying towards a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry, who takes an introductory programming course in Python.

  2. 2.

    Java ranked first.

  3. 3.

    https://www.python.org/doc/versions/.

  4. 4.

    https://tinyurl.com/pcg-survey2018.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Information Systems, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Abejide Ade-Ibijola

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  1. Abejide Ade-Ibijola
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Correspondence to Abejide Ade-Ibijola .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Salah Kabanda

  2. Computer Science, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa

    Hussein Suleman

  3. University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Stefan Gruner

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Ade-Ibijola, A. (2019). Syntactic Generation of Practice Novice Programs in Python. In: Kabanda, S., Suleman, H., Gruner, S. (eds) ICT Education. SACLA 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 963. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05813-5_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05813-5_11

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05813-5

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